WordPress is the most popular CMS to create a website for your business. WordPress powers nearly half the sites on the internet, and that doesn’t come as a surprise to us! And that is precisely why the WordPress 5.5 update is a big big thing!
Every new WordPress update always catches a lot of attention, and the reason lies with the volume of websites dependent on WordPress for existence and functioning.
WordPress just launched WordPress 5.5, and it is a topic of discussion among the web-developers these days. Not only the release comes with improvements on the block editors, but also the makers have put special attention to content prereview and much (much!) more.
The new update will also allow you to edit inlined images – the feature has got web developers’ mouths watering for sure. To give you the idea of what this means for you, we will list the essential functionalities and changes in this blog post.
Take a look, and don’t forget to read through the end.
The Auto-Update feature for Plugins
If you are into web designing business or have a website that depends on plugins that need constant updates, this might come as a savior to you and your time.
This feature of WordPress 5.5 will let you enable auto-updates for your different plugins and themes. But it is to be kept in mind that this might be a slight security threat to the website.
This can be done by navigating your admin dashboard and clicking on your “Plugins” in your menu. Switch on the “the auto-updates” next to every plugin you want to be automatically updated.
Want to enable auto-update for your theme? You have to click on “Appearance” in your side menu, choose “Themes” and click on “Enable auto-updates” like that you can find under your theme’s name.
These plugins have been the best aides of restaurant businesses these days as we have observed, and they might love to have the auto-update feature to save some valuable time.
The choice of automated versus manual updates
If you can make up your mind about the use of this functionality, keep the following in mind. It’s a great practice to test new versions of plugins in a safe environment like a staging website before using them on a live site.
In the real world, many business owners and website managers can’t or don’t do this. In some cases, you might choose to do these updates manually to avoid risks compared to the auto update feature where you won’t know what happened and when?
This is something that every site owner should consider on a case-by-case basis for each plugin. When possible, we recommend testing to keep an eye on changelogs to make sure that they understand what might be new and what’s different in an update.
Default XML Plugin
With the new update, WordPress introduced its XML sitemaps. It’s a sigh of relief for all those who have been toiling hard to get better and better with the SEO part of their digital existence, and we love it!
For starters, an XML sitemap is a file that gives search engine direction to all of the content on your site. This will help them discover and index your pages and posts, which is quite essential for the SEO of a website.
Now that the XML Plugin sitemaps are included in WordPress as a core feature, more than 1 in 3 sites will have these enabled by default. Isn’t it awesome?
Sitemaps are beneficial for any website since they aim to create a user-friendly website. They can also help secure the top ranking on search engine result pages and contribute to crawl and index your site more quickly.
Your Site Performance is pivotal when it comes to your online success. Although many factors affect your site performance, you need to keep each of those in check to rise.
Improved Content Preview
While writing a post or page in the block editor, you get a pretty good idea of what this page will look like on the web. Nonetheless, the content preview is (or updates).
This update comes with an additional device previewer, enabling the developers to preview their content on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. That way, you can make sure that your content is accessible and readable to everyone that visits your site.
Mobile traffic has been growing exponentially recently, and that puts immense pressure on digital platforms to stay ahead of the curve with regards to mobile device performance. The improved content previewer in WordPress 5.5 will be a great deal with that as we have experienced.
Dakota Garlic is one of the world’s leading websites if you are looking for delicious recipes. They have welcomed this update with open arms, and they have been happy with the way things are going with mobile device visitors to their site. Won’t you give it a try too?
Ability to edit inline images
The considerable improvements in image editing are what has caught the most attention. This WordPress update gives web developers a lot of options to edit their images, including the option to edit images within the editor.
This means that you won’t have to open the image in the media library, you can rotate, resize, crop (and so on) the image right on the editor. You will also be able to see its effects immediately, including on the rest of your content.
Moreover, this will also help you a great deal with image SEO for your website. These inline edited images enhance the SEO credibility of your website. So, what are you thinking then?
However, you have to keep in mind that this may not work for all of your images, as this feature is mainly focused on the standard image blocks.
A great deal of improvement to the Block Editor
Last but not least, the new update brings numerous (and no doubt remarkable) changes to the block editor.
With the latest update to WordPress, Block editors’ qualitative functionality has gone up a notch or two, which revolutionizes the way you customize your website.
With some notable changes in the UI, this release introduces us to block patterns and new block directory. These WordPress updates have got us excited. What about you?
The Block patterns aim to allow users to build and share predefined block layouts, ready to use right away for everyone. This adds so much convenience to the way you can create your pages. Doesn’t it?
Welcome to WordPress 5.5
The new updates to WordPress are quite artistic, and they also have added immense value to functional operability and ease of access for those who manage websites over WordPress.
Moreover, you might now need a theme that has all these WordPress features for you to take full advantage of the latest update. We have a few great choices for WordPress themes for you.
Doesn’t that get you going? At least we couldn’t resist going through all of these features in the updates. You should give them a try too.