Performance Improvements & Upcoming Changes

Improving website performance continues to be a major focus for our team. This month’s deployment includes several updates designed to make sites faster, more efficient, and easier to maintain.

Modern Image Formats (WebP)

We’ve begun implementing support for next-generation image formats using WordPress’s Modern Image Formats functionality. WebP is a modern image format that produces significantly smaller files with no visible quality loss. This change will meaningfully improve page load times and overall site performance.

How it works: Images will be converted to WebP format at upload time. The original full-size file is preserved in its source format.

What you will notice: For most users, nothing changes. Images display identically. Performance improves. The only visible difference is that right-clicking and saving an image from a WordPress site produces a WebP file instead of a JPEG or PNG. WebP is widely supported, but may require an extra step if you need the image in tools that do not yet support the format.

This feature is currently in testing and will be enabled on selected sites. No action is required at this time, but we’ll share additional guidance soon.

Updated File Upload Limits

To help improve performance and storage efficiency, we’ve introduced new upload size limits:

• Images: 3 MB
• PDFs: 25 MB
• Videos: 10 MB
• Other files: 10 MB

Our WordPress Guide includes tips for optimizing images before upload, but if you regularly work with large media files and anticipate issues with these limits, please reach out to our team. We’re happy to help identify solutions.

Code Modernization Effort

Our ongoing code modernization initiative is making strong progress. In this deployment, we’ve updated seven plugins to align with current development standards, improving stability, performance, and long-term maintainability. We are also continuing backend infrastructure improvements, including updates to our PHP environment.

As always, if you have questions, please let us know. We’re happy to help.