WordPress 5.5 is a major update with over 450 improvements and bug fixes. Here are the major changes you should know about in plain English.
Lazy Loading
One of the most exciting changes to WordPress is the addition of native lazy loading. Native means that the feature is built-in.
Lazy loading makes your site perform faster.
What’s great about this feature is that you don’t have to do anything. It sets itself, making your site faster.
Lazy loading postpones the download of images and videos that aren’t on the screen or needed. This means everything else on a web page can be used by a site visitor faster, as the browser doesn’t have to wait for everything to download. As a visitor scrolls down the page, the images and videos are downloaded when needed. Fast loading web pages are associated with more ad revenue and more sales. Native lazy loading is a beneficial upgrade for WordPress publishers.
Theme and Plugin Auto-update
WordPress introduces a feature to automatically update all themes and plugins. This is important because some updates are critical for preventing hacking attacks. Hackers often hijack a site due to out-of-date plugins and themes. This new feature will help keep a site hacker-free and is useful for sites that don’t change much and don’t use many plugins.
However, there are edge cases where a plugin update might introduce unwanted issues, which is why some publishers prefer to manually choose which plugins to update and when. It’s sometimes safer to manually update plugins for critical patches and wait longer before choosing feature-upgrade updates.
WordPress theme and plugin auto-update is turned off by default, and publishers need to enable it to take advantage of this feature. Many publishers, particularly small business owners with generally static sites that don’t use many plugins, will find this feature useful.
WordPress Site Maps
Site maps help search engines discover new web pages to rank. WordPress will introduce built-in site maps, eliminating the need for a third-party plugin to generate one. However, the site map feature lacks some important elements, like image site maps. An image site map helps Google understand what a web page is about, as images can rank in search results. While this feature is helpful, it comes with some caveats.
Older Browsers No Longer Supported
Support for Internet Explorer 6 through 9 will be dropped in WordPress 5.5. This change will result in less code and a leaner, faster-performing website.
Outdated CSS Styles Removed
WordPress has removed CSS styling code specific to IE 6 – 8 in this update. Most users do not use these older browsers. Real site visitors don’t tend to use outdated browsers, so this change will make style sheets smaller and faster to download.
Masonry-layout Support for Old Browsers Removed
WordPress’ masonry layout library will drop support for IE 8 and 9. Users who wish to support these older browsers will need to make appropriate code changes.
WordPress 5.5 Installs a Way to Check Plugins
WordPress has implemented a way to check if a plugin is rogue and to halt it from being updated. According to the WordPress documentation, the new auto-update UI would benefit from having a way to remotely disable the auto-update for a plugin/theme.
Takeaway
WordPress 5.5 is a major update introducing many useful features that will make sites perform faster and help WordPress publishers better achieve their goals. Publishers may want to consider enabling the auto-update feature if it fits their circumstances.
Citations
Refer to the official WordPress Announcement for more details.
