Site Health plugin extension for the performance score

[oglekler]

To make users able to check the impact of plugins and themes and see if their usage is worth it or not we need an additional plugin with a connection to the repo, like an extension for Site Health (Jeff Paul suggested that it looks like a Site Health related).

The "message" of the Site Health extension can be:

1. Check your site performance
2. Get results (and act)
3. Share information (purely related to plugins execution without any personal or domain-related data) with the repository to give plugins you are using a performance score.

Why we need to check performance:

Plugins (and themes) can be heavy and make a huge impact on site performance for small enhancement site owner wants.

I proposed to add a performance index to plugins and themes on the repo:

​https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5731

But there is no way to get actual data, especially for plugins, without real websites, so, it looks like the only way to get real information about plugins' performance is from sites owners and their own free will.

[tomdevisser]

I love this idea, mainly because every optimization actually helps with a more sustainable future (​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFpxE59YU1Q&t=19s). Maybe it's possible to add a step when reviewing plugins that get committed to the repo, where we check:

• If it enqueues auto generated minified files;
• How many files get enqueued;
• Do a quick speedtest on an empty WordPress install;
• etc.

They have to be checks that can be automated though, otherwise we'd have to check all plugins after every update they release.

[flixos90]

While I think this is a promising idea, it is incredibly complex to tackle, both from a technical and philosophical perspective.

Coming up with "objective" ways to measure a plugin's performance is extremely difficult, and as you mentioned, only real-site performance is a truly good indicator of a plugin's performance impact. There are certainly some lab heuristics we could use to get a sense, but it's very limited. An extra complexity would be to come up with a score - e.g. how strongly would you weigh different kinds of performance problems plugins might have? And then there's also the reputational implications - we would need to be very sure of such a benchmark before we roll it out to all kinds of plugins.

Given all this complexity, I don't think this is feasible to implement any time soon. More importantly, I think this is something that would need to primarily be tackled as part of the Plugins Team, as it relates to plugin quality. If the WordPress plugin directory had a system for this, Core could use the results as well. But the root of this would need to be implemented in the directory, not Core.