Dries Buytaert
@Dries
I enjoyed this article. It made me wonder how we could improve these scores with out-of-the-box Drupal. Core Web Vital will become very important soon.
https://www.thirdandgrove.com/insights/core-web-vitals-drupal/
- https://twitter.com/Dries/status/1382615497213153282
What is the problem to solve?
Performance on the web has always been an important topic, and Drupal has been a leader in this space - back in the day with some of our pioneering early varnish caching strategies, or more recently with our cache contexts in core and systems like BigPipe.
However, setting up a site to be performant (particularly as a small site owner or site builder) can still be a challenge.
We've recently re-emphasized the site-builder persona, and like the 'Easy-out-of-the-box' initiative it may be worth considering a 'Performant-out-of-the-box' initiative.
Per @Dries' tweet quoted above - Google is trying to simplify the core metrics by which they measure performance, as the 'Core web vitals' https://web.dev/vitals/
In an ideal world:
- Drupal's out of the box configuration would maximize score on those vitals.
- Drupal would have some basic performance analytics built in, to help guide site builders.
However, we might be constrained by setting certain 'performant defaults' by what is supported by someone's hosting environment.
Who is this for?
This is for small-to-mid-size site owners and site builders - medium to enterprise scale users typically will have their own performance tuning and front everything with a CDN anyway.
Result: what will be the outcome?
The outcome would be Drupal being highly performant out of the box (using web vitals or other measures as our yard-stick), and site owners will have better visibility into their individual site's performance.
The truth is Drupal Core is already very performant out of the box, but there may be some features that are currently optional which sould be enabled by default - and performance issues can be introduced with new modules or in the front-end layer.
Possible tools we would need:
- A core policy framework for deciding on what options/field values/image styles/etc should be enabled by default to improve performance.
- Some sort of basic performance analytics insight - especially something that could somehow give clues about modules causing performance issues, or even give insight into theme/front-end framework performance.
- A 'maintainer' role to look at this on an ongoing basis, perhaps?
Some of this may already existing in core policies and documentation - so certainly forgive my ignorance where I've missed anything we're already doing!