Matt Mullenweg from the WordPress Core Contributor Team announced the arrival of WordPress 5.5 named “Eckstine” on August 11. Named in honor of Billy Eckstine. The latest version of WordPress is now available for downloading and updating on your dashboard.
This is the second WordPress release this year.And it brings a lot of new features, improvements to the block editor, speed and security enhancements and more. You’re going to learn what this update has to offer.
WordPress team continues to improve editing experience. All of the latest editing features were tested in the Gutenberg plugin before arriving on WordPress 5.5. Some of the most notable changes include inline image editing, device previews, and smoother block motion with better drag-and – drop, block movers, block selection, and block relocation.
Posts and Page Speed Improvements
Lazy loading feature has been implemented in this update to improve page, posts loading speed. This loads the images when the reader is about to see the image.
This feature will also work on mobile devices and it will save mobile data and users are going to experience faster loading pages, posts. It will also save the battery on their devices.
New Features in the Block Editor
Block Patterns
Block Patterns are arriving for the first time in WordPress 5.5, with some default patterns already available in it. Block patterns makes it easy for you to create complex designs very easy. You will just have to choose the pattern you want in your page or post and then customize it as per your taste and then place it.
New Block Directory
WordPress included Block Directory feature in the latest version. It will make easier for users to search and install blocks directly in the editor. Selected blocks are automatically downloaded in the background, and activated and put in the content automatically. The benefit is that users don’t need to interrupt their workflows to add new functionality. You can also uninstall blocks installed through the editor from the plugins page in the admin.
Block patterns and the new block directory will make the page build faster and hassle-free. Users can quickly try out new blocks and check that match their style perfectly.
Inline image editing
Inline Image Editing is added to the Block Editor. This will allow users to crop, rotate, and zoom photos right from the image block. This will be a useful feature for bloggers, e-commerce owners, photographers, etc. who use a lot of images.
New Sitemap Feature
WordPress 5.5 includes an XML sitemap by default to help search engines discover your website pages, post easily. As a result, this is one of the key SEO features, this is done by default, so you won’t need a plugin for this. It will not affect the performance of pages or posts or conflict with other plugins as it is a basic implementation.
Security Updates
The latest version of WordPress gives you the option to choose whether or not you want the plugin and themes updates automatically. Now you don’t have to worry about updating the latest plugins and themes on your own.
The auto-updates can be turn on or off. You can do all this on the Plugins page.
Accessibility Improvements
WordPress 5.5 brings improvements to the accessible publishing experience.
You can now copy links to media screens and modal dialogs with a button instead of trying to highlight a line of text.
You can also move meta-boxes with your keyboard and edit images in WordPress with your assistive devices, as you can read the instructions in the image editor.
Changes for the Developers
There are also many new changes and improvements for developers. Such as
Server-side registered blocks in the REST API, WordPress has standardized way to define a site’s environment type, Dash icons and more. In addition, if you want to learn more about it then please check out these in detail.
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