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 After an in-depth performance analysis earlier this year revealed that translation affects server response times, WordPress contributors came up with six technical solutions for consideration to improve performance on the approximately 56% of websites that use translation. Performant Translations is a feature project of the Core Performance Team and is now available as a plugin on WordPress.org. It combines some suggested solutions and speeds up translation by converting .mo files into .php files, allowing them to be parsed faster and stored in the OPcache cache. It supports multiple file formats (.mo, .php, and .json) as well as multiple text fields and locales loaded simultaneously. Existing .mo files are converted into .php files and then loaded by WordPress. The graph included on the plugin details page shows that page load times are significantly reduced when using the plugin compared to a translated website that does not use the plugin. The plugin's translation results are v...

 WooCommerce version 8.3 has been released, bringing the shopping cart, checkout, and order confirmation blocks as the default checkout flow for new installations. This is a major milestone in WooCommerce’s journey towards a block-first checkout experience. Version 8.3 is slightly delayed as core developers work to ensure it is compatible with the latest changes to WordPress 6.4 and the planned release of PHP 8.3 on November 23, 2023. They also want to give plugin developers time to prepare for the new reality of shopping carts and checkout blocks as default settings. The FAQ document outlines the steps for developers who still need to make their extensions compatible. Developers with extensions that do not support the new Block Checkout by Default feature are encouraged to declare their plugins as incompatible so that WooCommerce can display a message to users in the settings sidebar. (For plugins that do not extend the shopping cart and checkout flow, no action is required). Whil...