Recording Why You Did It That Way
I spent three hours yesterday digging through a client’s site, only to find a bloated, “optimized” plugin that was actually just a graveyard of conflicting scripts. It’s the same story every time: someone makes a “performance tweak” in a vacuum, leaves no trail, and leaves me to play digital archeologist. Most people think they need a massive, enterprise-grade wiki to handle this, but they’re wrong. You don’t need more bureaucracy; you need to figure out how to document performance decisions so that the next person—hopefully you, or someone less caffeinated than me—actually understands why a specific script was deferred or a font was swapped.
I’m not here to sell you on a complex project management suite or a heavy-handed corporate workflow. I’m going to show you how to build a lean, functional paper trail that actually survives the real world of WordPress development. We’re going to talk about documenting the “why” behind the “what,” ensuring that your speed gains don’t evaporate the moment a new developer touches the codebase. No fluff, no expensive overhead—just straightforward logic that keeps your sites from turning into the slow, unmanageable messes currently sitting in my “horror story” folder.
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Decoding the Ghost in the Machine via Engineering Decision Records
When I inherit a site that’s crawling, I’m not just looking at bloated CSS; I’m looking at a crime scene. Most of the time, the culprit isn’t a single plugin, but a series of “quick fixes” that were never actually recorded. This is where engineering decision records become my best friend. Instead of playing detective and guessing why a developer bypassed a standard optimization to favor a specific, heavy animation, I want to see the actual paper trail. If there isn’t a record of why a certain architectural path was chosen, you aren’t just dealing with a slow site—you’re dealing with undocumented chaos.
Treating these records as a living part of your software architecture documentation changes the entire workflow. It moves the conversation away from “I think this is slow” to “here is the specific moment we traded latency for a specific feature.” When you document the why behind a performance trade-off, you aren’t just making notes; you are performing proactive technical debt management. It stops the cycle of me coming in six months later, seeing a weirdly configured database query, and having to spend three billable hours figuring out if it was a genius move or just a mistake.
Why Your System Design Rationale Is Currently a Lie
Most of you claim to have a “strategy” for performance, but let’s be honest: your system design rationale is usually just a collection of “we did this because it worked at the time” excuses. I see it every time I inherit a site. There’s a massive gap between what the documentation says and what the code actually does. You might have a folder full of vague notes, but unless those notes explain why a specific plugin was prioritized over a custom function, you aren’t documenting anything—you’re just performing digital archaeology.
The truth is, if you aren’t maintaining rigorous engineering decision records, your “rationale” is just a post-hoc justification for technical debt. I’ve spent far too many hours digging through bloated CSS and redundant scripts only to realize the original developer didn’t actually weigh the trade-offs; they just followed a tutorial. Without a clear trail of benchmarking results analysis to back up your choices, you aren’t designing a system; you’re just stacking bricks and hoping they don’t fall over. Stop pretending your current mess is a conscious choice and start actually recording the logic before the next person has to clean up your wake.
Stop Guessing and Start Recording: 5 Ways to Actually Document Your Mess
- Capture the “Why,” Not Just the “What.” I don’t care that you increased the server timeout; I want to know why you thought that was better than optimizing the database query that was causing the hang in the first place.
- Log the Failed Experiments. If you spent three days trying to shave 200ms off a page load with a specific plugin only to realize it bloated the DOM, write that down. It saves the next developer from making the same expensive mistake.
- Baseline Everything Before You Touch It. You can’t document a “performance improvement” if you don’t have the original, ugly numbers to compare it against. If there’s no baseline, there’s no record of progress—just vibes.
- Link the Decision to the Metric. Don’t just say “we optimized the images.” Tell me you moved from JPEG to WebP because the Largest Contentful Paint dropped from 3.2s to 1.8s. If the data isn’t there, the documentation is just a diary.
- Keep the Context Close to the Code. If a performance tweak is a one-off hack to fix a specific theme bottleneck, document it right there in the codebase or the commit message. Don’t bury it in a Notion doc that nobody is ever going to open.
Stop Guessing and Start Recording
Look, at the end of the day, documenting your performance decisions isn’t about filling out more paperwork to satisfy some imaginary auditor. It’s about building a paper trail so that six months from now, when a new developer—or a much more tired version of yourself—tries to “optimize” a critical function, they actually understand why it was built that way in the first place. We’ve talked about using Engineering Decision Records to kill the guesswork and why your current design rationale is likely just a collection of convenient myths. If you don’t capture the why behind your architectural trade-offs now, you are essentially leaving a ticking time bomb of technical debt for the next person to deal with.
I’ve spent way too many hours unravelling the mess left behind by people who thought they could just “wing it” with their site architecture. Don’t be that person. Treat your performance decisions with the same respect you’d give a carefully curated typeface collection; every choice should be intentional, documented, and defensible. When you start treating documentation as a core part of your development workflow rather than an afterthought, you stop just building sites and start engineering sustainable systems. Now, go audit your decisions before they become someone else’s nightmare.
