I had a client last month running a high-traffic WooCommerce store—roughly 50k products—and their admin dashboard was a total nightmare. Every time they clicked “Edit Product,” it felt like waiting for a dial-up connection. They’d already thrown three different “speed booster” plugins at it, which just made the WordPress admin performance worse by adding more JavaScript bloat to the backend. It’s a classic trap: trying to fix architecture problems with more plugins.
My first instinct was to just throw a blanket preloading script at it. I thought, “If I can prefetch every link the admin might click, the perceived speed will skyrocket.” Big mistake. Within ten minutes, the server’s CPU usage hit 100% because the background requests were hammering the PHP workers. I had to pivot. The real fix wasn’t about more requests; it was about smarter loading and better caching detection, exactly what the core performance team discussed in their latest year-end chat.
Solving WordPress Admin Performance with View Transitions
One of the biggest shifts coming in WordPress 7.0 is the graduation of the View Transitions plugin into core. If you’ve seen how modern mobile apps feel—where screens slide or fade seamlessly—that’s what this brings to the WordPress admin. It’s not just eye candy. By reducing the “white flash” between page loads, it significantly improves the user’s perceived speed. You can see the full discussion on this over at the official Make WordPress blog.
But here’s the kicker for developers: you can opt out if your custom admin screens aren’t ready for it. Here is how you might handle that in your theme or a site-specific plugin using the bbioon prefix to keep things clean:
/**
* Disable View Transitions if they clash with your custom admin UI.
*/
function bbioon_disable_view_transitions() {
remove_theme_support( 'view-transitions' );
}
add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'bbioon_disable_view_transitions' );Speculative Loading and “Moderate” Eagerness
The core team is also working on ticket #64066, which shifts how “eager” WordPress is about preloading links. Currently, it’s quite conservative. The plan is to move to “moderate” eagerness whenever a proxy cache (like Nginx or Varnish) is detected. This is a game-changer for sites that use server-side caching but don’t necessarily have a dedicated performance plugin installed. This is closely related to WordPress performance troubleshooting because often the bottleneck isn’t the code, but the browser waiting for the server to wake up.
I’ve seen cases where developers try to manually implement speculative loading and end up breaking their checkout flows. The beauty of this moving into core is that it will use the Site Health API to check if caching is actually active before ramping up the preloading, preventing the CPU spike I mentioned earlier.
The Secret Sauce: Compression Dictionaries
There was a very technical deep-dive in the chat about “Compression Dictionary Transport.” This sounds like jargon, but it’s huge for block themes. Usually, when you move from page A to page B, the browser downloads a whole new bundle of CSS. With compression dictionaries, the browser can reuse the “intersecting” parts of the CSS it already has. This is especially useful for the features introduced in WordPress 6.9 and later, where block styles are enqueued on-demand.
If you’re managing a site with heavy block usage, this will drastically reduce the amount of data transferred. It’s essentially “delta updates” for your CSS. For a more technical breakdown, check out the MDN guide on compression dictionaries.
Making the Admin Useable Again
The roadmap for 2026 is focusing heavily on the Dashboard landing page. Right now, it’s a mess of widgets that all load synchronously. The goal is to retire script concatenation (wp-admin/load-scripts.php) in favor of modern preloading. Concatenation was a great hack for HTTP/1.1, but in the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 era, it actually slows things down by breaking browser caching. I’ve written before about handling performance without breaking CSS, and this core change is the right way to do it.
Look, these performance updates are great, but they get complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work at scale, drop me a line. I’ve probably seen your specific nightmare before and already have the fix ready.
Is your admin dashboard still feeling sluggish, or have you tried the new Speculative Loading features yet?
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