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 very close to the page load times of the English (untranslated) website.
“With enough testing and feedback, we hope to eventually merge the plugin into WordPress core,” performance team contributor Pascal Birchler said when announcing the plugin at X.
"In the coming weeks and months, we will share more testing instructions and continue to improve the plugin. This will also be available through Performance Labs."
Users testing the plugin can report issues on the support forum or create an issue on the GitHub repository.
Performant Translations is considered a beta testing plugin, but may be tested and used in production at your own risk. No changes to settings or configuration are required after installation. The plugin can be safely removed after testing as it will basically clean up after itself. Once the plugin is deactivated and uninstalled, all .php files it generated will be deleted by the server.
