What’s New In WordPress 5.5?

To those who don’t know and to those who know, WordPress is one of the largest Website Platforms embraced by many individuals and businesses to create their Website. More than 27 Million websites are developed using the WordPress platform and out of which, according to BuiltWith 39.7% of the top ten thousand websites in the world use WordPress as their Website Content Management System.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is known as the Content Management System or CMS which allows you to create content and share with the Internet. WordPress was created back in 2003 and since then it has become the most popular content management system or website publishing program in the world. 30% of the websites are made with WordPress.

WordPress offers a block editor that helps to create your content, ways to structure the content, manage your content, and options to customize and optimize your website.

What’s New In WordPress 5.5?

The WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine” is out, Which is the second major release of 2020, brings some major changes in the block editor, plugins update and etc. To give you an idea of what this means let’s take a deep dive into the important features and changes of the release below.

Lazy Loading

Lazy Loading images is a technique used to optimize websites where the images below the visible area won’t be loaded until the page is scrolled down. Before the release, Web Developers had to implement lazily load assets via JavaScript, using the IntersectionObserver API or using scroll, resize, and orientation change event handlers. But since, Lazy loading becomes standard in the 5.5 release developers need not write custom codes or javascript libraries to implement it.

Device Preview

It’s really frustrating to know how your WordPress website would look on every device. But the WordPress 5.5 release comes with an additional device preview which makes you preview your content on desktop, tablets, and mobile screens. That way, you can make sure your content is more accessible and readable for everyone visiting your site.

Build-in XML SiteMaps

Sitemaps are a list of URLs to allow search engines to quickly crawl your website. It ensures they find all of your web pages that they might otherwise miss when indexing. Sitemap plays a huge role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) until now users depend on the plugins to index their content.

New WordPress update can eliminate some of the SEO plugins which mean all the homepages, posts pages, custom post types, core taxonomies (tags and categories), custom taxonomies, and users indexable by default.

Auto Update for Plugins and Themes

For those who forget to update the plugins and themes, WordPress has good news for you.  Users can simply enable auto-update for all the plugins and themes they have used through the WordPress dashboard. WordPress recommends you to keep all your plugins and themes up-to-date.

Inline Image Editing

Editing Images inline has been the most helpful feature in WordPress 5.5 updates. Editing images is easier now than ever with the ability to resize, crop, scale and rotate images directly from the image block.

Block Patterns

Block Pattern is a new feature from WordPress 5.5. These are commonly used blocks with pre-configured settings that you can instantly add. This allows you to quickly create page layouts while maintaining consistency in style across your website.

Other than the above-mentioned points WordPress 5.5 has made some huge changes in Block editor, new UI Design, New Block-based Navigation and etc. Since WordPress 5.5 has launched some super easy and helpful features, many developers have started to move on to WordPress 5.5.

Stay Konekt-ed with us, as we will bring you the latest updates and happenings on WordPress and more!

Stefan Richi StanislausSoftware Engineer