I recently had the chance to sit down with Weston Ruter, a longtime WordPress core contributor and someone whose story reminded me why I love talking to people about the open web.
Weston’s first computer wasn’t some fancy setup, it was a Radio Shack Tandy with no drives and a cassette player. From there, he graduated to a Gateway PC (complete with the cow print box) and slowly built his skills through trial and error, Netscape Composer, and eventually diving into raw HTML when the WYSIWYG editors crashed.
Before WordPress came into his life, Weston built his own CMS. All static HTML written to the file system. Basically a static site generator before anyone was calling it that.
WordPress + Open Web = Perfect Match
His first taste of WordPress came via a one-click install from his hosting provider in the early 2000s. But what really drew him in was the project’s commitment to open standards. Weston had been geeking out on W3C specs for fun (yes, really), and WordPress felt like home.
Fast forward a few years and Weston was working at an agency where he helped bring WordPress into client work. Eventually, he started contributing directly to WordPress core, starting with Customizer enhancements that brought widgets into a visual drag-and-drop experience.
He hasn’t looked back since.
Today’s Work: Making WordPress Admin Faster
In our conversation, Weston shared what he’s working on now: improving the WordPress admin experience by making use of the browser’s back/forward cache (BFCache). The goal? Instant page loads when navigating between admin screens, especially for logged-in users. It’s the kind of deep performance work that doesn’t always get the spotlight, but makes a real difference in day-to-day use.
He’s also helping lead efforts around client-side performance metrics, speculative loading, and other clever ways to speed things up without breaking things. It’s technical stuff, but it all comes back to something simple: making the web feel fast and easy.
Why I Loved This Interview
Weston’s story is a reminder that big things often start with small curiosities. A broken web editor. A random blog post. A Perl script sold for $25. That spark of “I wonder if I can build this…” is what pulls so many of us into tech in the first place.
If you’ve ever rolled your own tool, obsessed over site speed, or just wondered how people end up contributing to major open-source projects like WordPress, this one’s for you.
Thanks again to Weston for the conversation—and to everyone out there keeping the open web alive.
Links mentioned:
- Trac ticket about enabling bfcache: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/63636
- Nocache BFCache plugin: https://github.com/westonruter/nocache-bfcache
- Gemini Code Assist for GitHub: https://github.com/marketplace/gemini-code-assist
- My talk about Optimization Detective from WordCamp Asia 2025: https://weston.ruter.net/2025/02/21/boosting-performance-with-optimization-detective/
- Blog post about my contribution history: https://weston.ruter.net/2025/05/14/a-decade-as-a-core-committer-my-wordpress-contribution-history/
- My blog: https://weston.ruter.net/
- The RuterSearch project from 1999: https://github.com/westonruter/rutersearch
- Performance Lab plugin! https://wordpress.org/plugins/performance-lab/
Weston’s socials:
https://bsky.app/profile/weston.ruter.net
https://www.linkedin.com/in/westonruter/
https://x.com/westonruter
Full Transcript
Roger Williams (00:00)
At what point did content management systems become the thing and did you ever roll your own?
Weston Ruter (00:05)
Oh, yes, of course. uh, I called it, uh, well, I was interested in, in HTML. There’s these front link relationships where you can have like parent or in like next and previous. And, and so I made a CMS that was, like family, something
Roger Williams (00:07)
you
Weston Ruter (00:28)
related to the family and you would create children, pages, and then they would have siblings and it was all HTML written to the file system. I guess static site generator before it was cool.
Roger Williams (00:42)
Yeah,
nice. At what point did open source software and specifically WordPress come into your world view?
Weston Ruter (00:49)
I had a blog that I made about linguistics back in, I think, 2003, maybe? was through my host. There was a one-click install and it was WordPress. So I think it was, I think it was WordPress at one point, something like super old. And I didn’t do a lot of hacking on it back then, but.
Roger Williams (00:59)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (01:15)
That was my first exposure to WordPress. then I’ve always really loved just open standards and open web technologies.
Roger Williams (01:27)
Hey everybody, it’s Roger with Kinsta. I’m joined today by a new friend, Weston. Hey Weston, how you doing?
Weston Ruter (01:32)
Doing well.
Roger Williams (01:32)
Awesome. Hey, you know, we connected because you’re a contributor for the WordPress project and, um, you know, Kinsta is helping out support your work with that. And I wanted to just chat with you and, know, obviously we want to talk about the WordPress project. That’s, that’s the most exciting stuff, but I’m really curious to like, get to know you a little bit better and learn kind of your origin story. How did you like get into computers and WordPress and stuff? Take us back a bit. Like, do you remember like your first computer memory?
Weston Ruter (02:01)
Yeah, we got a Gateway PC back in I don’t know 1995 or something It came in the cow box the spots and It was just before Windows 95 came out. So we got Windows 3.1 1 1 for work groups, right? and So I that was my first computer
Roger Williams (02:10)
Yeah.
Yep. ⁓
Yes, yeah.
Weston Ruter (02:29)
Actually, we had a Radio Shack Tandy before that.
Roger Williams (02:32)
Yeah.
One drive or two drives?
Weston Ruter (02:35)
It had no drives, it had the cassette player that you played the programs into it via. So I remember, I think it was called Star Quest and it was a game that was 2D black and white game with the monitor, you know, molded into the keyboard. That was my video games I had as a kid. And then we had a Pong game too that my mom had.
Roger Williams (02:38)
⁓ okay.
yeah.
Sure, sure.
Weston Ruter (03:00)
We were,
my mom, my parents were not all on board with the video games for our household.
Roger Williams (03:06)
in a similar boat so with the gateway 95 I mean the internet was right there so it like a ol prodigy how were you getting online right
Weston Ruter (03:14)
we had Juno, our email service to dial up to get the emails. And eventually we got GTE. They had, they had a like five megabyte, free website hosting service. So that was my first, I guess, attempt at getting a webpage made. but I had to.
Roger Williams (03:16)
Okay. Yep. Yeah.
⁓
Okay.
Weston Ruter (03:36)
learn or add to use HTML at that time to be able to do that. And I didn’t know HTML. So I kind of, that was kind of a dead end. then, then I was using Netscape at the time, of course, and Netscape 4 had a composer, application that came with it, that you could do whizzy wig, webpage building. And so that’s how I started learning how to.
Roger Williams (03:46)
Yep.
Okay.
Weston Ruter (03:57)
how to make web pages and then, but it was kind of buggy. So, and because I was using these heavily table-based layouts, as you did back then, was the nesting was so complicated that it would crash Netscape Composer. So that was what forced me then to dive into the HTML source so that I could make the change I needed to manually because,
Roger Williams (04:05)
Yes.
Weston Ruter (04:18)
it would crash otherwise if I tried to do it with the user interface.
Roger Williams (04:21)
Yeah, it was always fascinating how much those WYSIWYG’s just fell apart as soon as you started just trying to make some slight changes to them. Alright, so then fast forwarding a bit, did you go to university for computer science or anything like that?
Weston Ruter (04:33)
Yep. I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science and also minors in linguistics and Spanish. I, I was wanting to study like computational linguistics and I was interested in that intersection, but I did, I found some crossovers, but I still appreciated that experience. I, I use, I still speak Spanish and love learning languages, learning.
Roger Williams (04:35)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (04:55)
American Sign Language right now as well.
Roger Williams (04:58)
Okay, all right, all right.
When you’re in your comp sci, I took one semester of comp sci and the thing that kind of drove me a little crazy in there was nothing was about the web or the internet. was all just, we were doing like 3D graphics and stuff like that. Was that kind of your similar experience or did your program kind of delve into the internet a little bit?
Weston Ruter (05:20)
No, it was mostly C++ and just like operating systems and more lower level things. So most of what I’ve learned or what I learned from the web on the web about the web was from getting like my first computer book was Pearl for Dummies. that from getting that from Barnes and Noble and reading it cover to cover and
Roger Williams (05:35)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (05:39)
I just ate it up and then yeah from there on it was a lot of the dummies books.
Roger Williams (05:44)
Sure,
sure. So the old CGI bin directory and building stuff. At what point did content management systems become the thing and did you ever roll your own?
Weston Ruter (05:54)
Oh, yes, of course. uh, I called it, uh, well, I was interested in, in HTML. There’s these front link relationships where you can have like parent or in like next and previous. And, and so I made a CMS that was, I think it was, can’t even remember the name. think it was like family, um, something
Roger Williams (05:56)
you
Weston Ruter (06:20)
related to the family and you would create children, pages, and then they would have siblings and it was all HTML written to the file system. I guess static site generator before it was cool.
Roger Williams (06:34)
Yeah,
nice, nice. At what point did open source software and specifically WordPress come into your world view?
Weston Ruter (06:42)
I had a blog that I made about linguistics back in, I think, 2003, maybe? was through my host. There was a one-click install and it was WordPress. So I think it was, I think it was WordPress at one point, something like super old. And I didn’t do a lot of hacking on it back then, but.
Roger Williams (06:52)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (07:08)
That was my first exposure to WordPress. then I’ve always really loved just open standards and open web technologies.
all the W3C specs, I would like read them and like just study all the different aspects of them. And because WordPress was like had web standards as a, as a priority and like, you know, those XHTML valid, buttons and all that, the emphasis on adherence to
Roger Williams (07:37)
Sure.
Weston Ruter (07:42)
The web standards I think was attractive to me about WordPress, but then I…
Yeah, I started to use it in other projects and I like to do things online and open and not close. So actually there was one closed source project I had back in 1999 called Router Search, which was a Perl program for doing like a site search. I modeled it after Yahoo at the time.
Roger Williams (08:15)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (08:15)
with all
the search operators before Google was, I guess, on my radar so much. But I sold copies of the licenses for like 25 bucks and I think I made 200 bucks from that. For me at the time that was like living large. But yeah, ever since then everything has been open source. I haven’t sold any software that I remember.
Roger Williams (08:27)
Nice.
Absolutely.
Weston Ruter (08:37)
But yeah, so WordPress, open source, web technology, open web technology, open web standards, it’s all like perfectly aligned with my interests and started using WordPress at a agency I was working at in 2007 and kind of got them on board with using WordPress for building out their sites for clients.
Roger Williams (09:01)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (09:02)
That was kind of the launch pad for me to then go fully in on using WordPress for client projects.
Roger Williams (09:09)
Okay, okay. At what point did you start contributing to WordPress?
Weston Ruter (09:13)
Well, let’s see.
I read a blog post about this that dives into the history and now I think it was 2000-
Nine is my first core props But I started contributing heavily because
At the time I was at XWP and we had a client who we wanted to use the customizer for so that they could have this live preview experience to be able to see the changes that they’re making before they go live. And there were features that were lacking which, which were needed for them. And so I started to
The biggest feature I started working on was the, in the beginning was adding widgets into the customizer. And so instead of, so it was basically like block builder 1.0 in WordPress, where you could have visual drag and drop of blocks, but in the customizer and not using blocks, but using widgets and having the live preview experience there. so we use that for clients to help them build out.
Roger Williams (09:53)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (10:12)
their landing pages and index pages and things like that.
Roger Williams (10:16)
Very cool and from then and then that was it. As soon as you started contributing you were hooked and you haven’t looked back.
Weston Ruter (10:22)
Yeah, the work that I did on the adding widgets to the customizer got me heavily involved in the customizer component. then because of that work, I was given commit access to WordPress core back in 2015. And so I’ve been, and then I was a co-lead of the 4.9 release and
Roger Williams (10:40)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (10:50)
I’ve just been consistently involved in every major release since 3.2, I think, or 3.5. I can’t remember. My blog posted a little.
Roger Williams (10:58)
Wow, awesome. Absolutely,
absolutely. So besides the customizer, are there any projects that are now baked in that really stand out to you that you were really proud to be a part of?
Weston Ruter (11:11)
Well, the past couple of years, I’ve been heavily involved in the core performance team. And in that team, we have a plugin called Performance Lab, which is like a…
collection of performance feature plugins that are incubating for eventual merge into core potentially pending feedback from the community. And in that project, there’s one called, there’s a plugin called optimization detective, which uses
is a framework for collecting client side metrics for how a page is actually laid out to be able to then apply optimizations more accurately than what WordPress can do on its own. Because say if you have a page that’s laid out and you have an image which is the
what’s called the largest contentful paint. WordPress is gonna guess what that image is gonna be, but it doesn’t know if it’s actually in the viewport or not in the initial viewport. And so you could be that the first image in the post is actually way outside the viewport because there may be paragraphs of text or maybe it’s visible on mobile but not desktop or…
Or vice versa. so this project will, will let visitors to the site contribute those metrics for how the page is laid out to then be able to then better optimize those pages for future visitors so that the actual important elements get prioritized and how they get loaded. if there’s like a, if there’s like a embed that, you know, well,
change its height when it loads, like a tweet or something from Blue Sky or WordPress post embeds, it’ll measure the height that those embeds have after they’ve resized and then reserve the space for that so that when they do load, they don’t cause that layout shift. so a lot of optimizations are possible when you have those client-side metrics that WordPress doesn’t have.
Roger Williams (12:55)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (13:02)
by default because it’s a server-side, PHP-based environment.
Roger Williams (13:06)
Okay, okay, so that’s using all JavaScript and client side operations.
Weston Ruter (13:10)
Yeah, well, it’s using, it’s using the, it’s using a web vitals library, from the Google Chrome team, as well as, I mean, that’s an abstraction on top of this underlying performance observer on the web platform. And so it uses that to collect those metrics about the, measurements about where elements are on the page.
which are in the viewport, which aren’t on the viewport. And then with that data saved to the database, then all of those optimizations can be done server-side with PHP, so there’s no JavaScript involved at the actual serve time.
Roger Williams (13:43)
Oh, okay.
Excellent. Excellent. All right. So very cool. Very above my pay grade here. I’m swimming in trying to figure out the words here. But sounds really cool. So, you know, today we’re at 6.82 I think is coming out like today or really soon.
Weston Ruter (13:59)
Just yeah.
Roger Williams (14:01)
just came out. Six nine is on the horizon. We’re kind of getting roadmaps in a little early to start speculating too much on that. But it sounds like you’ve got a project that you’re hoping to get in there. Can you tell us more about that?
Weston Ruter (14:14)
Yeah, there’s one of the new features in 6.8 was this thing called speculative loading, which allows you to navigate more quickly when you to other pages on the site by if you hover over the link, the browser will start to or actually by default in WordPress, the it’s the conservative eagerness so that as soon as you click, as soon as you mouse down or touch
Roger Williams (14:19)
Yeah.
Weston Ruter (14:35)
down on the link, it’ll then start making the request for the page before you release the mouse click or release the finger. But you can have it do more aggressive pre-rendering of those pages so that the navigations appear to be instant because the browser has loaded the page that you are going to already in the background. So it’s
basically the same as like switching tabs in the browser. Well there’s another much older ability related to that and it’s called the back forward cache or BF cache and if you navigate around a random WordPress site you’ll notice and you’re not logged in that navigating I mean most of the time unless there are certain
scenarios where this BF cache is blocked from working. But if the BF cache is working, if you navigate from page A, B, C, D, E, and then you hit the back button, then those back button navigations will be instant. The previous page will show up instantly. And then if you go forward, the next page will show up instantly. And that’s the BF cache. But if there is a unload event hit listener or
the page uses WebSockets or the page is served with this no-store cache control response header, then the browser won’t put it in the BFcache, and so then the browser will basically have to rebuild the page from scratch. Whereas when it’s in BFcache, the entire snapshot of the page
All the JavaScript, all the DOM, everything is stored there in memory so that it’s immediately there, available to you to go back to. But if, yeah, bfcache is not available, then you’ll notice that there’s, it feels sluggish to then go back and forward. And that’s the experience you get now in the WordPress admin because all pages are served in, when you’re logged in, all pages are served with this no store.
directive for the cache control header. And that was done in part to prevent those pages from being cached by like a proxy, like varnish or something. But also for privacy, because if you are working on something super sensitive and then you log out, well, if the pages you were working on aren’t bfcached, then you could just hit the back button to go back.
Roger Williams (16:27)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (16:40)
and see what those are, what was on the page, even though you wouldn’t be able to make changes because you had been logged out. So for those reasons, the new store directive was added, but there are alternative ways to preserve the privacy by this page show event listener and other mechanisms that I’m working on.
Roger Williams (16:58)
Yeah.
Weston Ruter (16:59)
but, and then there’s this, no, private directive for the cash control response header, which is what actually is intended for preventing those pages from being cached in by proxies. So that’s already there in WordPress. And so what, what I’m working on is, is there’s a track ticket and then I have a plugin that’s pending for the.org directory. It’s called no cash BF cache.
and it will allow you to when you’re in the login screen there’s with a checkbox that says the checkbox that says remember me along with that there’s this new little sparkle button and it will say if you click on that it opens this popover that says now new feature if you remember me it’ll also enable bfcache and so when you have
Roger Williams (17:28)
Yeah.
Weston Ruter (17:41)
then logged in, it will then omit that no store directive from the response header and then also include JavaScript on the pages to make sure that after you’ve logged out that those pages in bfcache get evicted so that the privacy is preserved.
Roger Williams (17:57)
Okay, alright, so you’re going to single-handedly improve the speed of WP-admin.
Weston Ruter (18:03)
Well, that is the hope that, I mean, in my own use of the WordPress admin, was feeling it was painful for me to navigate around. So I wanted to improve it for myself. And so, and actually a couple of years ago, was, I think it was WordPress 6.5. There was a track ticket for the use of unload event.
Roger Williams (18:14)
Sure.
Weston Ruter (18:24)
listeners in WordPress admin, which are another reason why BFcache is blocked. And so I was thinking, I was excited because I got that committed and I was saying, okay, now we’re going to have BFcache. But then I didn’t realize that at the same time or shortly before this other commit came in that added no store. So all that works, I removed, unload was invalidated by the no store. So it’s revisiting that.
Roger Williams (18:44)
you
Weston Ruter (18:50)
that ticket from 6.5 and hopefully will allow for a much faster navigation experience in admin. And also on the front end too, because if you’re logged in, this no store directive is sent to every request while you’re logged in. let’s say if you have a WooCommerce store where you’re logged in as a customer or BB Press or Buddy Press or membership sites, anything like that.
you’ll be able to benefit from this BF cache to speed up navigations.
Roger Williams (19:18)
Very cool. I’m looking forward to this happening because I too would like to see things sped up a little bit in the admin. As far as working on this goes, if other contributors are interested in working on it with you, what does that look like in this instance?
Weston Ruter (19:32)
There’s a track ticket that is on the WordPress core track. And then I have a repo on GitHub that is open and available for anybody to contribute to.
Roger Williams (19:41)
Excellent. All right. All right. We’ll grab a link for that and throw it into the notes here. The time has flown by I don’t want to take up too much more of your time, but I’d be remiss to not get at least some of your excuse me. Get some of your thoughts and insights on the hype of the day AI. Are you a vibe coder? Do you utilize these tools when you’re working?
Weston Ruter (20:00)
I don’t vibe code. I haven’t tried it, but I do use some of the auto completion features in PHP storm. I have, I use, actually I enabled a Gemini code assist for GitHub, which I’ve been really happy with because it basically adds a AI coder viewer to your, all your projects. And actually I learned about it from Adam Silverstein.
Roger Williams (20:13)
Okay.
Weston Ruter (20:23)
because he had a code for his. And so whenever I open a pull request and Gemini code assist will give me a summary of the changes in the pull request and then it will give me inline code review comments about areas of concern or, and then it’s caught things that I missed. So really useful.
Roger Williams (20:42)
Okay, so almost like a grammar leaf for coding.
Weston Ruter (20:45)
Yeah, I don’t use Grammarly, but yeah.
Roger Williams (20:46)
Okay, all right.
Am I am the ultimate of laziness so I use all of these tools although I don’t code But if I did I would definitely use them all too So that that’s great. I Appreciate the insight on you know using AI, but you know maybe being a little bit skeptical of it Maybe not you know both feet jumping into the deep end. Is that pretty accurate?
Weston Ruter (21:08)
Well, I mean, I will use Gemini, I have Gemini subscription, like Gemini Pro, whatever it’s called. So I will use it to brainstorm ideas and get code reviews even like in the Gemini web app. But in terms of the IDE, I’ve still been exploring the best like, I use PHP Storm, I’m trying to figure out the best.
Plug in and there’s various options, like all competing, Gemini, chat GBT, and then JetBrains is own plug-in. So I’m still like waiting to see who’s gonna win me over.
Roger Williams (21:41)
Okay, okay, all
right, all right. So you’re being wooed, I love it. This has been great, Weston. I really do appreciate your time and giving us some insights into like your history and how you approached computers and the WordPress project. If people wanna get in touch with you, ask you questions or pick your brain and whatnot, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Weston Ruter (21:59)
Probably blue sky or I mean I’m on blue sky Twitter LinkedIn You can send me a contact form message on my my blog. So yeah, it was very very nice
Roger Williams (22:11)
Excellent, excellent. All right, well, we’ll have links for all of that in the notes for people to reach out and ask you all types of questions. Really great talking to you. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Have a great day. What’s that? WordCamp US, we’re, six weeks out. So I’ll see you there and I’ll hopefully see everybody else there as well. All right. All right, Weston, have a great day,
Weston Ruter (22:20)
We’re Camp US, right? We’re Camp US.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks.