Released on August 11th, the latest WordPress version is 5.5 and called ‘Eckstine’. The major improvement areas in this update are speed, visibility as well as security and you can download it from Get WordPress or backup your existing website and update it through your dashboard.
The new version is updated with several new and interesting features for your websites based on WordPress.
What’s new in the new WordPress update?
Every new version of WordPress aims to make it better in terms of user experience and ease of use. The most important changes are:
Lazy loading images for speedier pages
Images are one of the most common culprits slowing down your website. Even though they intend to improve the user experience by making your website more intuitive and interesting, they obviously take longer to load and may result in slower page load times sometimes.
The images will now wait to be loaded until they are to be viewed, which means the lesser load on the servers, quicker response, and avoiding loading of images that are not meant for the device.
Better visibility for your websites
This newer version includes an XML sitemap. And this facilitates the discovery of your new pages as soon as they are published live.
Therefore, more people will find your website and you can have more chances to convert the visitors. You can make the best of the visibility to retain visitors and make them return in the future.
Easy & secure auto-updates for plugins
Now, you can choose the plugins and themes that you want to auto-update. Therefore, you can always have your website up-to-date with the latest versions of all the components.
Moreover, if you don’t want a particular plugin to be auto-updated, you can simply turn it off! You can also manually update your plugins by uploading the zip.
New features for the block editor
There are many improvements in the block editor, but here are few of the main addition to the block editor are listed below:
Block pattern: This will let you use a combination of text and media to create beautiful layouts with the editor.
Block Directory: This feature will enable you to install new blocks into your website without actually leaving the editor as it is built right into the editor.
Image editing: Image editing is made easier with the inline image editing feature added with the new WordPress 5.5. You can now edit your images right into your image block and resize, crop, or rotate it.
These new features will make editing with your block editor more interesting with new updates. Besides, there are many other changes that make the user interface much better than it already is. The new borders and highlights around the options will make editing easier and intuitive.
Moreover, the block directory with the search feature will let you find if there are any blocks based on your requirements. If there isn’t a block that you have already installed, it will show you all the options for the feature to let you easily integrate it into your block editor.
New WordPress version & Templatic themes
We have started by updating our Directory WordPress Theme for the new WordPress version. The latest version of the Directory theme and the Tevolution plugin has been updated with the required changes to make sure it works well with your updated WordPress environment.
We are already testing all of our other themes, and till now, most of them turned out to be compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
So are you ready to update your WordPress now? Know more about the new features of WordPress 5.5