You built a site for a client, who complains that it takes forever to load the admin. You released a plugin, and your users tell you it’s slowing down their site. You explain to them that it’s busy doing very important things: sending emails, importing data from APIs, generating reports… All essential, but your users don’t want to wait around while these jobs run. As a plugin or site developer, you can improve the user experience of your application by processing these tasks in the background, or even on a separate server. Let’s take a look at the options, benefits, and trade-offs when implementing queues to handle background tasks.