We're launching a new speed test plugin at WordCamp Brisbane this weekend

It's great seeing WordCamps return to Australia. When we spoke with organiser Wil Brown ahead of WordCamp Sydney in 2024, it was the first one in five years. The national community was watching. "We’re the test case," he said, "the canary being dangled down the hole to see what happens!"

What happened must have been good, because this weekend WordCamp Brisbane is coming back for the first time since 2019 (and since we added Aussie-based hosting to our store). I'm stoked to be on Sunday's schedule, with a talk that isn't just a talk, but the official launch of PHP Vitals: A new WordPress plugin that can tell if your web host's performance measures up.

There'll even be a live demo which, as any developer can tell you, is the most daredevil thing you'll ever see at a tech conference.

It's not news that faster websites are better, or that improving WordPress performance can get tricky. When things are running slow it can be hard to tell if you need to deal with a rickety theme, a caching issue, a slow server, or something else. Especially if you're from Sydney, you might have heard me discuss this sort of thing before. There are so many possible culprits that we started to suspect that, at least some of the time, hosting has been guilty but getting away with it.

So we developed PHP Vitals. As I'll explain on Sunday, WordPress hosting is PHP hosting, and that's what PHP Vitals assesses in a series of quick tests. By bringing more transparency to hosting, we're helping you see the quality of the technical stack that your sites run on. An A-grade from PHP Vitals tells you that your hardware is optimised for PHP, that it's genuinely modern (not a 2019 model CPU, for example) and that you are free from other restraints. These are things that you, as the customer, can't see clearly. PHP Vitals can.

I'm really looking forward to finding out what Brisbane's WordPress community thinks of PHP Vitals. There'll even be a live demo which, as any developer can tell you, is the most daredevil thing you'll ever see at a tech conference.

So if you're at WordCamp Brisbane, make sure to fit this literal world premiere into your timetable. And wherever you are, get ready to discover a plugin that clarifies an important part of your performance puzzle: are you getting good value from your hosting?