Last week I have published a benchmark of all 4 latest major versions in the 3.x line. I am sorry to say, this is first WordPress major version in 3.x line that is a step back in terms of performance and resource usage. WordPress 3.2.1 remains fastest WordPress among all 3.x.x releases. In some areas, WordPress 3.3.0 is even slower than, year old, WordPress 3.1.4. Over the past week many users after upgrading to WordPress 3.3 noticed slower admin side on their websites. You can find discussions threads on WordPress.org forums, on Twitter and on many websites with some users had trouble upgrading and ended up with broken websites.

Upgrading WordPress problems and slightly lower speed on admin side are not related. This performance drop is not a problem, it is not a caused by a buggy release of WordPress, it is caused by changes made this time, and those changes are mostly UI related. But, before passing final judgment on new WordPress, lets see all the changes and improvements.

Flyout menus

Flyout menus

First thing you will notice when on admin panel, is that menu is not the same. WordPress now uses flyout menus. All top level menus are always collapsed, except for the currently active one. To see contents for collapsed menus, you need to hover over the menu item. So far, community is divided on the new menu design. For me, this is one of the features that was added just of the sake of having new UI feature.

Old menus were working great, this is more a regression considering also accessibility problems for disabled users or users with touch screen devices. Not to mention that you will need more time to get to the panel you need. In any case, it will take some time to get used to it, but in the end, you have to get used to flyouts, I doubt that they will be removed in next version.

Reportedly, new menus work fine on iPad, but they don’t work at all on any mobile phone browser I tried on the phone with Android. Last time I checked, Android has more mobile devices than iOS, but no one bothered to test new menus there. Now, if you use touch device than is not iPad, you will need multiple clicks and waiting for pages to load needlessly to get to the menu you need.

As with any visual improvement, it comes down to personal preference, and I am sure than many users will hate, and many users will love these new flyouts. Too bad that there is no way now to have both new and old and let users choose.

Context Help

As much as I dislike the flyout menus, I really like new context help tab. It opens into a configurable tabbed navigation panel with sidebar area that is really a nice touch. WordPress has all its context help areas converted, and I have done the same to convert context help for my Pro plugins. Hopefully, more plugins will adopt the new help system and use it. For now, here is the screenshot for the context help in GD Press Tools Pro:

Context Help

Admin Bar is now Toolbar

New adminbar has much more functions than before, it can’t be disabled on the admin side at all, and it is called Toolbar. Toolbar is smaller and darker and it integrates all previous header elements and old admin bar. From developers point of view, there are some new things added to the toolbar, like groups in menus and few more functions for better control and better menu items organization.

Still, after using it for a several weeks now while in beta and stable, I would prefer to have old layout back. WordPress logo button and drop-down are not really useful at all to be always on, stupid Howdy is always there (more on that later) and the fact that it is always on and that it can’t be disabled. Right now, only thing that keeps toolbar needed is user menu with log-out option, everything else is not important. I can confirm that I will be adding new tools to GD Press Tools Pro to deal with at least some of the toolbar annoyances. There are few plugins in the WordPress.org repository to handle new toolbar and move things around. Also, users of Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu will be frustrated to find out that this plugin is broken in new WP due to the toolbar changes. I expect update soon for that, but having always 2 toolbars on, is not good solution.

New toolbar duplicates needlessly too many things from the menu on the left, and if you remove duplicated options, and options that are useless, you will end up with empty toolbar. That’s why it ended on both my pros and cons list for new WordPress.

New Uploader

Uploader and Media Library

WordPress 3.3 brings new uploader that supports drag-n-drop and is not depending on Flash anymore. New uploader is powered by Plupload library (from creators of TinyMCE). drag-n-drop is supported by Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers and  Opera to get support with next major version. There are some improvements to the handling of media in this version and all these changes are great addition to WordPress, making adding of files more straightforward, since now all files are handled in the same way. On the editor toolbar, only one button is there to open media library.

Of all new features, drag-n-drop uploader is the one worth switching to new WordPress. If you deal with a lot of images, it will be faster to just drag them to the uploader when working on posts or in the library. Creating galleries will be faster, and more natural.

Core changes

While the most of the visual changes I find lacking, I like core changes. Permalinks are improved to allow proper use of slug only in the post links, and this new permalink format now doesn’t have any speed issues (before it required more SQL queries and depending on number of posts you have could cause problems). Now, the new post name only permalink is even recommended for links structure.

WP_Screen API is also improved to make creating admin panels/pages easier and more WordPress like. Best thing is rewritten editor API that allows for more than one rich text editor instance with no hacks to make it work, and it can be used on front end also. New jQuery 1.7.1 is included, as well as full jQueryUI 1.8.16. Post formats are now more prominent than before and they are available in quick edit mode also. I am not a big fan of formats, but I am sure that all users that use formats will welcome this change, it makes the process of changing post formats much easier.

There are more minor changes to functions, filters and actions, JavaScript used, but they are mostly low-level stuff and you can find all that in the changelog (link at the bottom of this review).

Pointers

Pointers, Welcome and About pages

To improve new users experience, WordPress got some interesting features: pointers, welcome and about pages.

Pointer should help with introduction of changes and features. While they look nice, after few days and several test installations, I find them extremely annoying. I expect that when plugins start using pointers it will make a mess on the page after upgrade. And I expect that we will soon get plugins to  always disable pointers.

About page looks really nice. You can see overview of new features, credits and freedoms tabs. Similar to this, new Welcome message displayed on the dashboard after installing WordPress 3.3 is a nice touch as well:

Welcome Message

There are many minor improvements that I like and that will maybe go unnoticed since they have a natural way about them and they blend into the interface. New toolbar icons and options are really great, new hidden-behind-icon search form on toolbar also. If you are using Tumblr, WordPress has new importer that can transfer data from your Tumblr website to your WP website.

Go away ‘Howdy’!

Removing stupid Howdy greeting from every single page should happened years ago. And yet, it is still here. And, you can’t change it. There are no filters that allow changing this word to something else. There are some complicated methods of replacing whole user item in the admin bar, but I expect that would break something else down the road. A lot of WordPress users hate that little word. It is time to get rid of it. Well, it is too late now, we need to wait yet another major revision for that. Was it that hard to add simple filter that envelops that word? I know it’s not, but some people decided against it. Problem is that now this is forced on front end too, because it is moved to new toolbar and that makes this much worse. Having a serious website on WordPress, with toolbar active, and stupid Howdy greeting your users, it is just wrong.

Plugins compatibility

While we go some new interesting core changes, too bad that they will remain unused for some time. Plugins need to be updated to take advantage of new editor, or new context help and other things. Considering how slow most plugins were updated before, this will take a lot of time. I expect that some plugins will be broken by new jQuery, and some will be broken with new editor. First plugins problems were already surfacing, and I expect more will be found. Good thing is that many developers are releasing updated plugin versions.

My Pros and cons list for WordPress 3.3

Should you upgrade to WordPress 3.3?

Yes, but:

1. Test on the sandbox to make sure that you will have no issues due to plugins or theme
2. Make a backup of whole website, files and database, so you can revert back if things go wrong
3. Try new WordPress locally to see how great new uploader is and to test all the changes
4. Clear the cache in your browser after upgrade
5. Clear the cache on website if you are using cache plugin(s)

I expect that current problems with new WP will be resolved, and I think that we will see 3.3.1 soon. It is important that only small number of users had problems upgrading, there are many factors that can be a problem, and not everything is direct fault of new WordPress. Upgrade problems existed with earlier versions, and will be here with future versions.

More important question is do you need to upgrade at all? Well, that comes to personal preference. There are no security fixes in this version that are discovered from WP 3.2.1 until now, there are no groundbreaking features you must have (except for uploader, but not everyone will need that), so test it and decide for yourself if you need new WP or not.

Useful Links:

• Detailed changelog on WordPress.org: codex.wordpress about Version_3.3
• Support forum on WordPress.org: wordpress.org Support
• WordPress Benchmark – 3.0 vs 3.1 vs 3.2 vs 3.3: dev4press.com Benchmark

Conclusion

My major complaint with new version are UI changes. What was wrong with 3.2 visually? Don’t mention the ‘vertical space’, because it is just a lame excuse. I understand the need to have design changed from 3.0 to get better looking menu with no space on the left, but this version I don’t get. I liked the header we had in 3.2.1, it was small and functional, I liked the fact that admin bar could be disabled. Now, we lost both only to get toolbar with 70% of useless options on it. All the great work done on optimizing WordPress 3.2.1 is undone with this new WordPress and unnecessary UI changes. I would prefer that WP 3.3 had: editor API changes, new context help, uploader and most important core changes.

There are several new things in WordPress 3.3, and many improvements that will be very interesting mainly to developers. Overall, I think that this is an average release, I have updated all my websites to WP 3.3 and I expected that all developers and users closely involved with WordPress will upgrade. But, the fact remains, this is once again mostly design-centric release that makes WordPress a bit different looking without many changes that will make a lot of difference for most people. Major problem with this version is that it lacks wide appeal, and I am afraid that most users will decide against updating. I have written about slow adoption rate of recent WordPress versions couple of weeks ago, and this new version will have same problem as WP 3.1 and WP 3.2 had (at least WP 3.2 was very fast, and even that didn’t help to get widely adopted).

Hopefully, users with WordPress 3.0 or older versions, will decide that it is time to upgrade after skipping some earlier versions. If that doesn’t happen, by the time WordPress 3.4 is released, we will have big fragmentation of WordPress versions on the market, and that is not good from plugins development and support point of view.

What we need in WordPress 3.4?

To stop needless UI changes. To get posts relations. To get usable posts and taxonomies management. To get improved user management. No more UI changes. Seriously, leave UI alone.

What are your experiences with new WordPress? What things you like and what you don’t like? Leave the comment and spread the word about this review.

WordPress Release Stats

Before we get to test results, first thing is to see how this 4 version compare when it comes to size, number of files, hooks, requirements and few other things. Latest version is the version we used to test here.

Test Environment

For tests I have used WordPress 3.0.4, WordPress 3.1.4, WordPress 3.2.1 and WordPress 3.3. Test machine is CentOS powered VPS server with PHP 5.3.3 and mySQL 5.5.14, with PHP memory limit set to 256MB. PHP runs with eAccelerator enabled. All WP installations used only GD Press Tools 4.3.1 Pro plugin, and all had exactly the same content. GD Press Tools Pro had all its security related features activated, and they add about 3 SQL queries per page, and these queries are counted in the results below. Since I run GD Press Tools Pro as a part of all my WordPress installations, I think of it as logical and essential expansion of WordPress.

Each test for each WP version is repeated 10 times, highest and lowest results are removed, and the average is calculated from the rest of the measured values. Same method is used for server and client (browser) side. For client side measurements I have used Firefox 8.0, and before each measurement, all cached data was emptied. I use my faithful Lenovo IdeaPad Y560 with Intel Core i5 and 8GB RAM. Testing is done on 4 most used pages in WordPress: dashboard, posts list, post editor and comments list. Other pages are similar to these 4, and they will not show much difference in overall results.

If you compare results in this benchmark with previous one comparing 3.0 vs 3.1 vs 3.2, you will see that results for these 3 versions are now different. Difference comes from using latest versions of each WordPress, using differently configured server, and new browser. It is interesting to see how much faster is Firefox 8.0 over 5.0 used for old benchmark.

Server Side Execution

For client side I have measured 4 elements: used PHP memory to generate the page, number of SQL queries executed, time server needed to generate the page and number of hooks (both actions and filters) registered for execution. As with any version of WordPress, each new version uses more memory than previous one. But, while first 3 tested versions had number of executed SQL queries in decline, new WordPress 3.3 uses 4 to 9 queries per page more. Number of queries in the test includes 3-4 SQL queries executed by GD Press Tools Pro for security purposes, and it is the same for all 4 tested versions.

With all this, execution time on server-side for WordPress 3.3 is about 10%-15% higher than in earlier version. Number of hooks is expected to rise, just like the used memory. But again, there is a big jump with new WordPress. You can see all data on the charts below.

Server Side: Used PHP Memory

Server Side: Number of SQL Queries

Server Side: Execution Time

Server Side: Attached Hooks

What this mean? In terms of server performance WordPress 3.3 is a big step backward from WordPress 3.2. I am not going into analysis why this happened, or if it was really needed, but the fact is that new WordPress doesn’t add any feature that warrants such change on the server-side.

Client Side Execution

Pages generated by new WordPress are only a bit larger than before, and the same goes for JavaScript used. Interesting thing is that on post edit page new WordPress adds less JavaScript, all thanks to new editor and quick tags code. Hopefully, we will see more JavaScript improvements like this in next versions. But, execution time is another story, and overall, this new version is slower even than WordPress 3.1 in some cases. Similar results are with cached execution, and new WordPress on average is slowest in the 3.x line.

As before, Firefox even with latest stable version 8.0 is still slower than Opera 11.6 or Chrome 16/17. It is not as drastic difference as before, but with Opera or Chrome, pages are loading some 20%-30% faster.

Client Side: Page Size

Client Side: JavaScript Size

Client Side: Execution Time

Client Side: Execution Time - Cached

What these results mean for end-user page loading? The difference is not big, we are talking about half a second slower execution. That is hardly noticeable, but it proves the conclusion from the server-side benchmark: new WordPress is slower than previous one, while in the same time you will not see why that is needed, what new features are so important to justify this performance drop.

Overall performance index

Last chart shows two interesting, overall comparison indexes. First one is for server-side performance, and other for client side. They take into account individual results for each test and each page. WordPress 3.0.6 is referent version for this test and results for it are normalized to 1.0 for all pages and tests. Lower value is better.

Server Side: Speed Index

Client Side: Speed Index

As you can see, speed index for each of the pages shows that WordPress 3.2.1 remains superior to new WordPress 3.3 in terms of performance. If we want to compare overall for client and server-side, look at the last chart bellow. Overall, WordPress 3.3.0 managed to cling to second place thanks to some of the improvements, like WP Editor API and some other JavaScript changes, but it is very close to WordPress 3.1.4 performance. WordPress 3.3 is some 7% on server-side, and (too) big 14% on the client side off from WP 3.2.1.

Overall Speed Index

Website front-end

I didn’t test new WordPress on the front-end. From using it in the past few weeks while in Beta and RC, I didn’t noticed any changes. I imagine that using some of the permalinks structures will improve speed due to permalinks changes, but other than that all 4 WordPress versions in 3.x line have very similar performance on the front end.

Conclusion

I can’t end this benchmark on a positive note as I did back in July for WordPress 3.2. I can understand that WordPress is evolving and that new features can need more resources. But, in WordPress 3.2 six months ago, features and changes were followed by considerable optimization, and that resulted in faster WordPress. This time, we got no significant new features or improvements, apart from cosmetic ones (and some of them are questionable at best) and some changes that affected only some features (uploader and editor), and yet new WordPress is gone back a full year in terms of performance, and it is comparable to WP 3.1 or even WP 3.0 in some cases.

I am sure that some developers will say that these results are not important. I agree that half a second is not much in terms of speed and that most users will not even notice the difference, but it shows that current development of WordPress is not done right. Adding new features and sacrificing speed and resource usage is not a good way to go. Big part of the blame is on development cycle, that is targeting 2 major versions each year (well, we got whole 3 major versions this year alone). Because of that, testing and optimization is not high on priorities list, developers don’t have enough time for everything. Even now, 3.3 is about one month late from projected development roadmap.

I really hope that this new WordPress performance is a ‘glitch’ in the development, and that next WordPress 3.4 will get it back on track. I also wish that WP 3.4 takes more time, and not to be rushed by May or June just for sake of having new WordPress. Lets have 9 to 12 months development cycles, and I am sure that released product will be better and more appealing to end users to get with faster upgrades.

For now, WordPress 3.2.1 is clear winner in terms of performance and resource usage between all 4 major releases in 3.x line.

Edit:

Server side Memory and Hooks charts replaced with new ones where Y axis starts from 0.

Currently all my plugins support WordPress 3.0 or newer (except one that depends on features added in WordPress 3.2). But, with the soon to be released WordPress 3.3, I would need to support 4 different major versions of WordPress. So, I was making plans to drop support for WordPress 3.0 when the WordPress 3.4 goes into development next year. But, I wanted to research this a bit to see how many websites are actually using each of WordPress versions. WordPress.org statistics page has WordPress versions distribution data, and you can see this data on the chart below.

To my surprise, WordPress 3.0 is still very dominant, while 3.1 and 3.2 together are used on about one-quarter of all WordPress powered websites, and all older WordPress version prior to WP 3.0 are used on 22.6% of all WordPress powered websites. WordPress 2.9 is almost 2 years old, and yet 11.1% still uses this version. But, for me, the most alarming thing is that WordPress 3.0 is still the most used version of WordPress.

WordPress Versions, Global Usage

So, what is the problem? Why global adoption rate of new versions of WordPress is so slow? I did some calculations based on the latest download counter on WordPress.org. As of today, WordPress 3.2 has 13.000.000 downloads. While that number looks impressive, in terms of adoption is really not. This number includes both 3.2 and 3.2.1 versions. Let’s assume that many users downloaded WordPress more than once, for development servers or some other reason (maybe 1.000.000 duplicated downloads, well, I have downloaded each of WP 3.2 versions at least 100 times for development). Also, let’s assume that people who decided to upgrade to WP 3.2, upgraded to 3.2.1. Some were switching to 3.2.1 directly, but that is hard to figure out. So, let’s say that based on number of downloads 6.000.000 websites actually upgraded to 3.2/3.2.1. Still looks impressive? Consider that official WordPress stats say that there are 35.000.000 websites using WordPress (this doesn’t include WordPress.com), this is only 17% of all WordPress powered websites switching to WP 3.2, and this is in line with 16.2% from the global usage chart on top of this article. As I said, 13.000.000 downloads doesn’t look so good at all. All these numbers and calculations are not very precise, but they are in the ballpark to illustrate the state of WordPress upgrades.

WordPress Versions by Dev4Press Users

These numbers are for all the websites WordPress.org gathers data from. On the other hand, I have made a similar chart based on data gathered by Dev4Press website from users of our Pro plugins and themes. Thankfully, this shows the desired trend of adoption, and WP 3.0 is going down, with WP 3.1 and WP 3.2 on the rise. If this trend was to continue, WP 3.0 will almost fade out for Dev4Press users in the next 6 months, before WP 3.4 is released. Good to see that WordPress 3.3 in Beta stage is already in use.

This big difference in usage shows that Dev4Press users, in this case, are more informed about the current WordPress development than the general WordPress user base. I expect that any other WordPress based business can expect similar data and trends for their users. These are more technically oriented users or users ready to embrace the progression of WordPress development, and they are upgrading websites to take advantage of new features or to make sure that they have latest security improvements and bug fixes.

With WP 3.3 coming soon, we still have 29.000.000 websites that didn’t upgrade to WP 3.2, and almost 7.000.000 that use pre WordPress 3.0! Why is this so bad? Well, there are few reasons:

1. As with any other software, it is a fact that old versions have bugs and security risks. This is true for WordPress also, and we have millions of vulnerable websites using WordPress. While it is a great thing to have big part of the Internet powered by WordPress, it is frightening to know that most of these websites are not secure. Bug fixing for new versions are great, but they don’t mean much if most website will not upgrade anyway.
2. This makes plugins development very hard, considering that developers need to support several very different WordPress versions, or to decide to drop support for older versions. This can be a good thing, if the users are forced to upgrade. But, many websites are postponing upgrade because of old and outdated plugins, and this is main reason we still see 2.3 or 2.5 on the chart. New WordPress and old plugins is an old problem, and I don’t see solution any time soon.
3. Money. Yes, for old websites dependent on old and no longer developed plugins, moving to a new WordPress is not cheap. In some cases, new plugins with similar functionality can be used. In most cases even if there is a new and different plugin, it will be incompatible with old plugin. So, website owner need to pay, in some case a lot of money to get old plugins fixed and upgraded, or rewritten.
4. WordPress development is not really driven by the needs of wider community. Many website owners I talked with, that use old WordPress, don’t feel the need to upgrade, since they have all they need with WordPress they are using. We may like it or not, but frequent interface changes in WordPress are not something users like to see, because very often they need to learn things they may not need at all. It is easier when users upgraded to each new WordPress, because changes are comparatively smaller, making a jump from 2.3 or 2.5 to 3.3 now, is a huge change, almost like using completely different system.
5. For a community so big as WordPress is, there isn’t a single website that can be considered as information center for all things WordPress and it is not a big surprise that website owners are not well-informed on current status of WordPress, plugins and themes development. And when I get a question from a user: ‘where can I find information on all things WordPress’, I honestly can’t recommend any website. I believe that lack of quality information is one of the major problems with adoption of new versions.

How to solve all these problems? How to improve the number of websites willing to upgrade and how to have a more secure websites running on WordPress. I know about all the obvious methods like better education of users on upgrade benefits, or improved security, but so far, that is not done properly at all. Individual efforts by people with work based on WordPress, have an effect on a very small number of users. Global community of WordPress website owners is not really affected at all by that. There are a couple of things I can leave as a suggestion:

1. WordPress.org based information portal would be best source of information. Right now, WordPress.org website is not useful to majority of users. Codex is largely used by developers or users that want to do things themselves, Forum is again a bit too technical, Plugins Repository is mostly a mess, News and blog are very limited in scope. I know that improving that website is not easy, but in the past 2-3 years hardly anything was changed there, apart from few updates to repository and small updates to Codex.
2. Slower development cycles. Right now, goal is to have two major WordPress releases each year. That is too fast, too many versions are in use already, and each year 2 more are added to the mix. One new WordPress version each year would be better, to allow users to get familiar with new versions, to have fewer changes and problems to worry about. Current core developers and contributors would have much more time to develop, much less chances to have bugs (most bugs are caused by haste) and maybe to focus their development time to WordPress.org.
3. Better literature. I know of many good WordPress books, but they are mostly written by developers for developers. I am still to see a good book about using WordPress. Even when such books are published, they are already outdated due to fast development cycle of WordPress. Only book that I know to be updated from time to time (still, development book for the most part) is Digging into WordPress by Chris Coyier & Jeff Starr.
4. Objective and open news websites. I am sad to say, but that there are no such websites now. There are some smaller websites that try to be informative, but they don’t have enough reach. The big, ‘the best’ WordPress websites are far from that. I know that editorial policy is internal matter for each website, but basic fairness in dealing with WordPress related services and products is not much to ask. I have personally experienced double standards from some WordPress websites and I know many fellow developers that had same bad experience. Whatever influences exclusion of information (money in most cases, or conflicting interests), is very bad for  the community and it creates a negative reputation for WordPress.
5. Better co-operation of developers. We have a lot of plugins, even very popular plugins that don’t play well with other plugins. In many cases, there is no will to resolve the issue. And that causes problem to end users that try to make their website work after upgrade and are getting broken because of the plugins. Many developers, even developers of commercial products, simply don’t care what they plugin or theme will do to the website and other plugins.

This was a lengthy article, but I think that current state of WordPress and slow adoption is a very serious matter that is not only about the fact that users don’t upgrade on a regular basis, but that WordPress developers and core of the community is not doing the right things to inform and educate about WordPress and related products. And I tried to include all things I considered relevant for the current state.

I would like to hear from you what do you think about current state of WordPress, about updates and how often do you upgrade your websites. What are most common problems you have when it comes to upgrade?