 Is this working? Yes. Cool, awesome. Thanks so much for coming, everyone. I'm really excited to host this panel. And we're talking about performance today. I'm really grateful to my panelists for agreeing to join. Just as a brief intro when I proposed this panel, performance for me is about way more than the raw speed of a website. It's about how users experience your website and how it performs for you as a website owner or a website builder. So we're going to broaden the topic of performance to include anything that can affect the experience that people have on your website. So just to get started, I'd like to go around and ask each of my panelists to just introduce themselves, say where they come from, why they might be here on the stage to talk about performance. I'm going to start from you, Miriam. OK. Hi, I'm Miram Shwab. I'm the co-founder and formerly the CEO of a company called Stratik. Stratik is a different approach to publishing and hosting WordPress websites. And we do that in static architecture. And by doing that, we remove the underlying server stack. And in that way, sites can be much more performant and scalable, et cetera, and secure. Stratik was acquired by Elementor exactly a year ago. I'm now celebrating my one-year anniversary there. And yeah, so now Stratik is part of Elementor. And I'm happy to be here on this panel. Hi, everyone. I'm Thierry, based in Switzerland. I'm a software engineering manager at Google, and specifically in Google Chrome and the web platform. And me and my team, we care a lot about raising user experience on the web, specifically for WordPress sites trying to make a better web. Hi. I'm Rahul. I'm founder and CEO of RTGAM from India. So as part of my work, I work with clients who are worried about performance and all the metrics that surround it. Excellent. And just in full transparency, I have a bunch of questions I'm going to ask here. And I have already shared those with the panelists. So we're just going to start out with something, hopefully, pretty easy. So what I'm going to ask is, if you would tell me about some work you've been doing recently to help push performance forward in your product or service or work area. And I guess I'll start with you again, Miriam. And then I'll vary who gets to start. OK, so I'm sure you know the world of performance is never ending in terms of how we approach it in different ways to try to optimize your sites for performance. That can start with the back end, and it also, obviously, can apply to the front end. So in terms of Stratik, we're constantly taking strides to optimize the front end in different ways. Because in Stratik, the back end no longer, it ceases to be a function or an aspect of performance just because it's not there. With a fully static site that's served up through CDN and available in hundreds of educations around the world, you kind of have checked that box. But then there's that last mile of performance. So there's aspects to that. That it's actually a constant challenge. Because in the end, if someone builds a site in a certain way and not always a good way, then that HTML code, the JavaScript, CSS, it's going to be problematic. And so how can we help that last mile be better even in a world where people can do whatever they want with their websites, including not great things? I'll just also represent the Elementor aspect. So Elementor is obviously the page builder plugin and also the hosting. And also there, performance has become, on both of those products, a very, very important focus and part of this strategy in terms of making the user experience like what you said. Performance is so much more than just fast. It's about a user experience. And so we've seen really great improvements around that on the hosting and the plugin as well. So as part of helping with performance to our clients, it's the first thing like whenever new things come, like there was PHP, Lighthouse, NOS, there's a lot of buzz around core web vitals. We put a lot of strays on educating them about the right metrics. For example, with web vitals, there is a lab score and there is a crux report. So many client things that if it's working fast on my site, that's it, like, oh, sorry, it's working fast on my computer, then my site should do well for everyone. And that's where we try to educate them like you need to use lab data as a reference but also work on the real world data and fix performance issue for everyone, not just for yourself. Yeah, for my part, then I guess I can speak a bit on behalf of the team, but we really are on a mission to try to make every WordPress site faster and that we have multiple projects going on. One area is trying to see how we can improve WordPress core, make core faster or bring new APIs to make core more capable from a performance perspective and then also provide better tooling for all of you, developers for sites or plugins and stuff like this to really try to embed performance as part of the development workflow and have better tooling, like, for example, better ways of checking plugins in terms of performance. And last but not least is working with the ecosystem. So we have Elementor with other plugin developers trying to really see if we can work together on whether it's adopting some of this tooling or actually making the product faster. So that's kind of like what we've been busy with lately. Excellent, thank you. Okay, so my next question is about artificial intelligence, the hot topic of the day. The artificial intelligence has been making amazing leaps and strides recently. So what role do you think artificial intelligence AI could play in performance and improving performance for WordPress? And I'll go to you, Rahul, to start. So like it's tough on. So maybe AI can generate images that are already optimized to begin with. So like all the image optimizations we do, like the post-processing, lose list compressions and all, like if you tell AI that, hey, I'm going to upload this on a website or I'm generating this one for the website, then I think it should take care of all those optimizations that are required for the web. Okay, so what would a panel be if we didn't talk about AI, right? Like it's required. I'm excited about AI because I mentioned that last mile of performance and it's really hard for humans to get that right. There's a lot of products and initiatives trying to hack away at that and improve that. But in the end, you've got render blocking JS, you've got render blocking JS and trying to shift that around without breaking things is like a nearly impossible feat. And I hope that at some point, AI will be able to take the output of a site and just like it optimizes at this point, let's say the content that we write, you can have it write a blog post and then tweets, I don't know if you do this, but I'm just saying you can, tweets, et cetera. Then at some point, the output of a site will be optimized by AI in a way that also makes sure that the front end continues to function. So I can see that happening at some point and actually on Stratik that would be ideal because we output the static and then it could kind of like have AI go better and then you've got like the best site. So that's kind of my vision of how AI will help with performance. So we'll take it, just like it takes a lot of things out of our hands that let's say we're not excellent at. So we're trying to do it anyways. So this could be something that it can help people with as well. Well, AI is an interesting space. And I think that we are kind of in the tipping point. Ideally, you know, it would be magical. Like AI solves all the performance problem and many more. But there's always a risk to do that automatically. And so I think that we far away from that still. But the advantage of AI is really that, you know, we can train the model is based on data. And there are a few areas which I think are quite promising. For example, on tooling, you know, at the moment we have great tools to identify performance problems and stuff like this, but not really helping to guide what we need to do next. There's a checklist of like, hey, you need to optimize your CSS, do your JavaScript and stuff like this. But it's not really contextual to any website. And so I feel that with AI and more data and train models, it will get better and better at identifying the problems and then giving some guidance more contextually according to a given site. So, you know, in the context of WordPress, it could be analyzing which plugins are installed or some setup and stuff like this and be much better at saying like, hey, here are the things that you need to do for your website and not just the checklist of things that, you know, we have documented essentially. So I see that as like a promising future with AI. Yeah, great, awesome. So my next question is just about the general performance of WordPress as a whole. And we've seen other platforms like Wix and Shopify dramatically improve their performance in the last few years, while at the same time, WordPress has either stagnated or maybe even decreased slightly compared to the web as a whole. What do you attribute that to and what do you think we could do to improve the situation? And I'll start with you, Thierry. Yeah, we have, I think, to look at the different nature of each CMSs. And you mentioned Wix and Shopify and they are kind of SaaS services and they control the stack base, the stack and stuff like this. So it's kind of easier to make changes. They're also newer CMSs and so they don't have kind of the legacy code base that WordPress has and WordPress is distributed. It's, you know, still a community, still and hopefully forever a community open source project with a huge ecosystem that, you know, it's a beast to move. So I think that's one, you know, like it's just slower moving but with that said, I'm really confident that we will catch up. So that's one problem. And I think the other one is also maybe the lack of focus on performance until now, which is, you know, I think good and a bad thing but we're really seeing that shifting a little bit or a lot hopefully. So there's now the core performance team and there's better tooling and there's a lot more focus on performance. We saw in 6.2 for the first time there was a performance release lead. So I think performance now is starting to be taken in consideration a lot more in WordPress and it will take some time for the entire ecosystem to actually do that as well. But I think that we'll catch up so. Can I, yeah, okay. So I think that like those types of platforms have an unfair advantage in that they can fully control everything that's happening within them end to end. So they also control what happens within them and by telling their users that they are limited in what they can do, right? So if you're building a site with Wix or Squarespace at some point, many users will hit a wall because they're going to want to customize it in a way or do something with it that it just doesn't allow because it's not open source because it is that kind of walled garden platform. So they have those limitations but they also have the advantage of being able to apply changes that they can just implement across the board and their sites with confidence because they know exactly what they allow and don't allow within them, right? So that's kind of an unfair advantage. I think Terry's right that there hasn't been a focus on improving performance necessarily in WordPress. I think a lot of the responsibility has been offloaded to the hosting companies. The attitude has kind of been, well, let's let the hosting companies try to solve this for us, which is legitimate because in the end the hosting companies are the platforms that are running WordPress. And that attitude applies to security and other aspects of WordPress as well. However, in the end, if the underlying software there's only so much that the hosting companies can do and there's only so much that they should do. So I've been in touch with Terry and other people on the performance team and I see that now there is more support and focus on performance in WordPress which is really, really amazing and really important for all of us. By the way, there's also an environmental aspect to this. If a site is using more resources and I just yell, it's like the parties last night, we'll just yell at each other. So if it's using a lot of resources on every page load then that actually has an environmental impact as well and I think that general kind of ethos of WordPress is better for humanity type of thing. So that's another reason we should be taking responsibility for it. So yeah, so those platforms have an advantage but I think that there's a lot of promising things that are happening within WordPress and it's becoming a focus which is really good for many reasons and hopefully already we see some amazing improvements made on the performance side and just one more thing that I wanna mention is backwards compatibility. Also pros and cons to that but when you're still supporting, I don't know, PHP 5.3 or something like that then obviously it's gonna have performance issues and we might want to, as a community, say well, maybe we want to move away from that to a certain extent. So as I mentioned that WordPress is a big open source project and everything has to move taking entire community into consideration. I think the web page, we wanted to make it by default and that resulted in a lot of discussion in that the amount of energy we put in the discussion whether to make it default or not. In that amount of effort, Squarespace, Vixen, all those appropriate platform just end up doing it and releasing those changes. Likewise, even if you make it web by default or bring other changes, we rely on hosting company's user choose and for example, all these appropriate platform are built in CDN. WordPress being self hosted, you download, you host it and where you're hosting it, whether they provide CDN or not. So there are a lot of variables like right from the decision making to the hosting companies, the consultant agency you hire, their technical capability. If you are hiring a SEO marketing agency who's special agent that and asking them to give better recommendation for performance, that also goes for us. If they don't know something, how can they make good recommendation about that? So there's a lot of variables and then with like this 43% of the web's market share, anything we do, we have to be mindful of not breaking because when we make mistakes, a lot of many sales break. Yeah. I'll just add something regarding like some of these other products as well is of course now, you know, with Gutenberg and some of the projects on improving the content creation and removing some of the friction and making it better. It's really important I think for WordPress site owners to be able to create content in a better way and more appealing content. But once the site is published, at the end of the day, it's about succeeding on the web. Whatever the site owner's goal is, whether it's selling stuff and things like this. And then user experience is really important at this point. And I think some of these other CMSs I've understood that because they have taken some case studies and they understand that if the site is that much faster, their own customers will actually succeed on the web. And that's really an important argument for other competitors. And it's actually a feature from my perspective, right? And so this is something that I think that we should all as a community try to do more is tie user experience improvements back to return on investment and business goals. If we want to succeed on the web, it is not only about like adding features and stuff like this. It's also about delightful experience for the people consuming the content across the world. Not only in the US, not only in Europe, but everywhere, right? And I think that's a key thing to keep in mind. And for that specifically, some of the other CMSs have taken this specific topic at heart. And we've seen Duda really promoting this, like we are offering a platform that's going to make you succeed because it's more performance and stuff like this. That's a really good point. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. Tying the business returns to performance also helps decision makers decide to invest in performance. And also thank you, Miriam, for bringing up sustainability. At Contributor Day yesterday, we formed the official sustainability group in WordPress. It was pretty exciting. And sustainability is definitely tied to performance. But they're not a one-to-one. It's not always exactly the same thing. But I think it's an important thing to bring up because it motivates people. It's something that people already really value. And again, can help make the right decision. Back to my questions. So when you're building your site or service or product, there's often a trade-off between adding features in and performance. How do you think about that? How do you find that balance between the two? Anyone who wants to go? Well, I guess I just spoke a little bit about this. Like, I had this forever debate with many people. Is performance a feature? I feel that it is in many way. And I'll keep it really short. But I think that it's about finding the right balance. You have to offer the right capabilities for whatever your goal is for your website. But without forgetting user experience, if your users are not even seeing your features because they're dropping up before, then it's probably not a good thing. And maybe a good way to do that is just try to analyzing the drop off point of your users. And maybe do some maybe testing as well. I was like, OK, if I had this feature, obviously it may affect my performance by this much. Is it really valuable? Is it translating to anything that's useful for the users? And that's probably the way to find the right balance. And like I said, if you have some fancy interaction and you see this is the time where all your users are dropping off, it's probably a feature you should remove. So having built a product for the last few years, basically when you're building a product and planning it, everything that you're going to implement, you need to consider multiple aspects to it, not just what it does, but what it might impact and what it might not do. And so performance is actually just one of those things, meaning when we implement something, we have to consider security. We have to consider user experience. We have to consider, does this detract from that? So from my perspective, performance should definitely be part of that. And as a product developer, if your product is starting to be slow for your users, they're not gonna care how amazing your features are. Seriously. I mean, if any of you, not any of you, you all use products. And if it starts to feel slow and sluggish, you're going to lose patience. I was just using a platform for something recently. I won't say what it was, because I don't want to badmouth it. And it's not from the WordPress space. I had to use it every day. I think it was probably targeted towards users in the US, so maybe there it was fast. But I'm in Israel and it was so slow that I probably would never use it again. And that's just an example. So in my opinion, always consider performance. On every part of your product, whether it's the WordPress site or if you're a hosting company or have some kind of platform around it, also your dashboard, you need to make sure that people are getting this kind of snappy experience because none of us have patience. And we all have other things we wanna do rather than wait five seconds for something to happen. So I think performance should always be part of the checks okay, we're implementing this. What will it do to performance? Will it make it worse? Will it make it better? Will it stay the same? Super valuable for your user experience and in the end, user experience is what it's all about and what will keep your product sticky. So as a agency, when we are building new feature, it's very easy to get the performance right for us. Like definitely require some budget, some efforts. The trouble starts when the feature involves some integrating something like header bidding or a third party analytics tracking, some kind of service, which either puts blocking JavaScript or some way affects the performance and then there's no way you can make it better like without getting in touch with the third party. And that's where a lot of friction happens. Like, so the thing is that the client or the site owner wants better core vibe vital, better score, all those things. But it gets tough to tell them that, make them understand that this is, the site is combination of everything that loads on the page, including third parties and if anybody has a blocking JavaScript or something like that, that is something we need to get them on board to fix it. And that's where it gets tough. Like, even if they have budget, even if they have desired to make things fast, we just end up being dependent on the third parties. Like sometimes we just move some of the JavaScript to worker thread, so the main thread doesn't block, but it's not always possible to do that without breaking the very first reason they added that JavaScript in the page. Yeah. I'll just add something very quickly that may be useful for this audience, especially those who are building sites for clients. I feel sometimes there's this kind of friction between developer or the agency and the client, the client pushing for more features and the developer pushing for more better performance. And it goes back to what I was saying about analyzing the cost of features. And I think that demonstrating to customers that a specific feature is actually hurting their goals. For example, adding some fancy things on the product page, reducing the actual sales or checkout rates is a great way to actually inform your clients, like, okay, you want this fancy feature, but it's actually making you lose this amount of money. So with A.B. testing, it's kind of a good way to do that. If you have this fight with your clients, maybe. All right, we've got time for one or two more questions here. Just sort of going to wrap up. I'm going to ask, let's see. Optimization plugins are very popular in the WordPress space. They often add features and optimize kind of after the site has been built. I see them somewhat as a bandaid to performance problems that maybe you've already built into your site. How do you think about that? Is that a good thing? Should more features that are landing in Optimization plugins be in core? And or is it okay that we have this system of Optimization plugins? What's your take on that? Anyone? Yeah, okay. I think that they are definitely critical and will remain to be critical. There's a lot more that we can do in core. But you know, there's a huge difference between Optimization on Optin and Optimization by default. And there's only so much we can do in WordPress core. We can be maybe a bit more opinionated, but not to the extent that plugin can be. And it also comes to integrating with external APIs, WordPress being distributed. There is no central really service that we can connect to. And so this really is plugin territory and for a good reason. So you know, I definitely think that there's a lot more that we can do in core, but I do feel that these plugins are in a really good place to offer more opinionated, bleeding edge features enabled by default. Yeah, so to add to that like, so as there is some part which is plugin territory, I feel like the WordPress itself run as a part of like LAMP stack or LAMP stack. And there are things that shouldn't be the WordPress territory also. Like for example, if you can add like a full page cache using IngenX or something like Redis or Memcache, you should try that. Like if you have, you can have MySQL query caching or PHP op caching. So there are multiple levels or layers where you can optimize performance. And once you do that, then leave the remaining things to the WordPress, but so I personally try to suggest that if you can move things like, move performance related optimization at early level, like before things reaches WordPress, that's even better. I just like to add. So I think that one of the great things about WordPress is that every site is super unique, right? Like no two sites are going to be the same. They're kind of like snowflakes. And so to try to have in core optimization that applies to all of those snowflakes, I don't know if that's ever going to be achievable. So I think the plugins will continue to serve a role as well. I'm just gonna come back to AI, but potentially at some point in the WordPress admin, it could say something to the user, like be like an assistant, like, hey, maybe instead of that plugin, which has these resource issues, use that one, or maybe you have this plugin installed, click this setting and it will optimize your site. Like maybe at some point, the user will get some kind of assistance from AI. But because of the snowflake situation, I think the plugins will continue to serve a role. Cool. Are we at time? We have time for one more question? One more question. Okay, I'm gonna do one more question, then we'll wrap up here. So this is actually, this is the question that I didn't give you guys ahead of time. So this is, but it's easy. So going beyond performance, what is your dream or vision for WordPress? We're at the 20 year birthday today or right now. Imagine we're 10 years from now and WordPress is celebrating its 30th birthday. What does WordPress look like to you? What is it doing? I've been in the WordPress space for above 15 years and I brought my daughter, Sarah, to this conference. It's the first time I brought one of my kids and she's 19 and it's been really interesting hearing her perspective as a young person, as opposed to me, an old timer. And also when you're in the industry for a long time, you start to like not see things, you know, from a fresh perspective. And what I think I would love to see is a situation where WordPress becomes appealing to younger people. She's been actually giving really good ideas to me. Like how do young people get influenced in terms of what they use, what products they use? So we don't do this. She's like, why do I know about Wix? You know, why do I know about Webflow but I never hear about WordPress? She's like, this is like a whole big world here but like in my day to day life, it's not something that ever comes across my radar. So, you know, she threw out like TikTok influencers, whatever, I don't know if we're going in that direction. So there's, and if we can, but I think we need more exposure to younger generation to get them in the door, to start using it from one side and then the other side is they are used to a certain type of user experience with the apps that they use on Instagram. You click a button, you have something online and you can create amazing media, whatever. And it would, you know, that's the user experience that the younger generation expects and rightfully so. They don't want to think about servers or versions or upgrades or whatever. And I don't know how, but in 10 years time, maybe we can get to a situation where that's kind of an experience that people can also get with WordPress. So, like we have put a lot of effort on Gutenberg. I think a big amount of effort of that scale can go to media management where, so like image formats and optimizations in one part, but so today like a lot of content creation, especially collaborative happens outside of WordPress. Like we build, we make like copy editing in Google Doc, then image editing in some other tools, then video editing, leaving feedback for videos. So a lot of content creation happens outside WP admin, probably that in coming years will and should move to the WP admin. And I think performance will play a big role. Like many people use these different tools because they have some performance trade-offs and also some feature trade-offs. So I think that's a big opportunity for WordPress to try to be that content where like you take pictures and by default you upload it on WordPress like media library. And later on you decide when you go back to your home or these three pictures I want to add to my blog post, but rest of also I can keep in my media library. So that you're like all the things about you, your private notes, your content. So the WP admin can be your home on the internet. This question wasn't written, but I have many dreams but I'll keep it really short. And you know, one that I think is really important and that I hope we get to, it's not actually performance related, but it's the onboarding flow to WordPress and we've seen many hosting and plugins and stuff, stuff like this, trying to address this problem. But related to what you were saying about younger generation and bringing people to WordPress, my dream is just that as a user you can easily capture what is your goal on the web. Why do you choose the web over other platforms and really to have your website created with the necessary tools and set up that you need to have a good starting point. And I would love to see that by default in core and so that would be a little dream. Like, hey, I wanna sell something and in three clicks you are able to add your products. So that's my dream. Thank you. Thank you so much to the panel. Please give them a very, very big hand. Many interesting points came up, but before I say anything, anybody who has questions, please there's two microphones, halfway up the stairs or down, depending where you're coming from. So if anyone would like to ask a question to the panel, please get to the microphone and get asking. In the meantime, I'm just gonna say, delighted that certain topics came up, such as sustainability and user experience as a designer, which is also connected to accessibility, of course, because that means that we include everyone when the user experience is great and also something else. But we've, I will mention in a minute because we've got questions. Have we, yes, please. Hello, so Matthew here. You talk a lot about the weeks and other hosted solutions, but I think what we have to work on with WordPress is the other hosted solution goes like maybe, well, Strapi is another solution, kind of a little different, but there are a lot of other CMSs like Ghost that does the same thing with maybe less plugins, but more JS related, and I think it's where is the performance, and if we want to do good thing, maybe WordPress has to go there a little, well, JS, JavaScript, priority, the CMS, and so. Can I answer? Well, so, there's a reason that WordPress continues to have larger, higher market shares, I think, than those platforms, and that's because in the end, the content management experience is so, like, straight streamlined and just powerful in WordPress and so flexible, but it just, I don't know if you're aware, but there is the REST API in WordPress, so people can build a headless, decoupled implementation of WordPress, use a React front-end or whatever they want to use, although in my opinion, I don't know why anyone would use React for front-end for a website, really, just don't, like sometimes it's developers making decisions because it's cool and shiny, but don't let your developers make decisions because things are cool and shiny, I'm just saying. Anyways, but you can if you want to because we have the REST API, so WordPress can give you that type of experience if that's what you want, and that's the beauty of WordPress, it's very flexible, you can use the standard version, it can be decoupled, it can be static with Stratix, you got it all. Is that okay? I think you should also be answering these questions. You're no longer the interviewer now, you can also. You actually can answer. I think we have a question on the right. Hi, thank you for the discussion. I wanted to ask about WP Admin, which is a massive performance Wild Wild West at the moment that nobody seems to care about. Every screen loads about 160 resources of JavaScript and CSS, no regard to context. What do you guys think about that as a user experience problem for the WordPress platform because admins are people too? Thank you. Yeah, it is definitely a problem and the way I personally look at it is we have many challenges and which one do we pick first? And there's a lot of investment that's going into improving the content creation on WP Admin. It's true that from a performance perspective, it hasn't been that much of a priority, although it should always be taken into consideration. But like I mentioned earlier on, I think caring about performance is fairly new at the level that we are at now and it is true that for now the priority has been about trying to make WordPress websites in the front end, so for the consumers, better and not so much in the WP Admin, although there has been some improvement in WP Admin as well. This is not to say that it shouldn't be done. I think it's just a matter of priorities and how many resources or people and contributors can work on this. So there's not so much about saying that we shouldn't. It's more like when and against other priorities. So this actually just came up. I was looking for benchmark data comparing the WP Admin performance because the focus around performance tends to be on the front end because in the end we want our websites to succeed and the success has a lot or mostly to do with how people experience the website when they visit it. So most of the focus tends to go towards how the front end experience is in terms of performance. But if the back end is slow, then the user experience is bad and eventually that's going to impact also how and if people even use WordPress. I was not able to get any benchmarking data because it's not a focus. So I think that's a really good question and it's a good topic to bring up in terms of awareness even that it would be good to give some attention because it does create a poor user experience and in the end, like I said earlier, that's what creates a sticky product or just doesn't. We have one more question I think. Yeah, hi, can you hear me? Okay, so actually the conversation came up with the difference between Wix and everything. So for me as a user, I believe that Wix and all other platforms, they are actually really easy to use because there are not much plug-ins and a lot of other stuff. So in WordPress, although it's good that we have multiple themes and multiple options, but the main problem which I have seen with people facing is that if they are, for example, working with Elementor, so they will move to maybe Gutenberg or some other platform, sorry, or some other plugin editor, so they will actually, they have to learn it from the start. So don't you think there is a gap in that one? Like maybe we need to strategize it so that like most people who are using it, so that not only developers can use it, some normal people can also use that. So yeah, that's my question. Thank you. I think it comes back to what we were saying about the user experience, maybe the younger generation. What's here I described, like one click and I've got a site that does X. It's maybe what WordPress needs is this kind of very simple, straightforward experience that everyone can get out of the gate and then if they want something more complex and they can do it themselves, but it's just, I'm just picturing even like almost like Instagram. Not exactly, but something that's just like, this is what it is. You can't do much to it. You can manage your content here, get it live, add media, add video, add whatever you want and that's it. So I think there is a use case for that type of very, very simple, almost like limited user experience in WordPress because like you said, it can be very confusing. When people see the admin for the first time, I mean, I think it's just like they don't even know where to look first and then they're like in the setting section, there's like what is a permalink? Who uses permalink in the everyday language, right? Like, you know, and we're so used to it. So I think it's a good point. The fragmentation problem is definitely a problem and right now it is a problem that the burden is definitely put on the site owner. So when someone creates a site, it's overwhelming the amount of plugins and things like this and it's what makes WordPress beautiful is it's very, very capable. There's a ton of extensions but it's also what puts the burden on new users and people who are not really used to work with WordPress and so it ties back to what I was saying about better onboarding, how can we remove this burden from the site owners while keeping in mind that there's an entire ecosystem around WordPress, like all of you plug-in developers and stuff like this. Also, we can't just say like use these 10 plugins, right? We need to keep in consideration that everyone needs to have a chance to submit the plugin and offer extendability and so how do we make it easier for the site owners while still being fair and to all plug-in developers, it's a difficult challenge to address. But I do think that there's a lot more we can do. Maybe this is also the thing that AI could help with, like saying, hey, you know, these type of sites with similar goals are using these type of plugins and there's definitely a lot more guidance we can do. I think we've got time for one last question. May I ask one? Hello, my name is Boyan. I wanted to talk about images. We all know that images are a very important factor behind performance, not just for WordPress but for the web as a whole. And at the moment, we are at the point in time where we're sort of deciding the next generation image formats that we're going to use to replace the legacy formats that we have been using for a long time. I know Adam has been driving the efforts including next generation image formats in WordPress Core, so thank you for doing that. I wanted to ask you about JPEG Excel specifically. It has been a bit of a controversial format as of late. If you all don't know the story, basically Google decided to drop that format from Chrome late last year which was met by the community with a bit of controversy. One of the reasons that were cited was lack of interest by the community. Although there have been many companies that have supported JPEG Excel and the reason that I'm mentioning it now is that just earlier this week there has been another major development where Apple indicated support for JPEG Excel is coming and Safari 17 and all of their operating systems as well. So I just wanted to get your opinion and if you had a chance to play around with JPEG Excel and what do you think about it? I guess I'll take that one since it was almost directed at me. Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, I'm a big fan of modern image formats and I did see that announcement. Another recent announcement was Edge announcing support for Avif. I will just a little caveat that Chrome actually never had full support for JPEG Excel. It was hidden behind like a flag so it wasn't actually part of Chrome. It's a nuance there but there was a lot of controversy about it being dropped. I think part of the discussion is around in terms of support on the web is around whether the advantages of JPEG Excel over Avif are significant enough to make it a viable additional format to support. There is sort of a limit to how many different formats browsers can support. There is some costs to doing that. And the other thing about these formats that's very interesting is that they're not static like the Avif and JPEG Excel algorithms keep improving. So when you look at studies to try to see, to compare them, it's difficult to look at them because you really have to look at the very current implementations. And also there's a lot of nuance about what size image is it. What are you using it on the web? JPEG Excel has some features that are not available in other formats but do those really help us on the web? I will say that the recent decision by Safari was kind of a surprise I think and it might change how things progress. There are some really cool things about JPEG Excel that other formats don't support but I'm not 100% sure that they're valuable to us especially in WordPress given that the way we generate images is in PHP, at least right now and there's no support for JPEG Excel in PHP. With Avif you have to get up to, I think PHP 8.1 to get the support but at least we're moving in that direction. So I think ultimately and we saw with WebP it was very we did not adopt that as the default because there's the other issue of besides can you see it on the web is like what happens when you download the image to your computer and then you try to use it somewhere else. So this is the challenge that all modern formats face. So right now I'm a big fan of WebP because I think it buys us a lot of the improvements maybe not quite as much as Avif and JPEG Excel but it's also broadly compatible almost everywhere. Not, you will never catch up to the legacy formats but it is quite quite good in terms of compatibility. So I'm creeping in to interrupt because I know that Adam you could carry on for another, you know for all day long talking about this but you'll be around won't you? So and also I recommend to check out on WordPress TV work in Bangkok where there's a talk by Adam on images and also very interestingly a talk by Alberto Medina who I believe is your colleague at Google isn't he about exactly how do we turn WordPress into something that is as easy to use for younger generations as Instagram and TikTok and all the rest of it. So I really recommend that you do that. Thank you very much to our panel. Please give them the biggest hand ever. Thank you, thank you very much.