WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine” is out and it’s a major update of nearly 500 improvements and bug fixes. If you’re a WordPress user, and many of our clients are, there are some major changes that you should be aware of and learn more about in normal easy to understand language.
Lazy Loading
One fo the best changes to come out of the new WordPress 5.5 update is the lazy loading of images. Yes, some themes or sites would have lazy loading with customizations to the CSS. Now lazy loading is native to WordPress, which means it’s built in.
Lazy loading will benefit you because your site will load faster. This is because lazy loading delays the downloading of images and video until the user needs to see them. For example, if you have a series of images halfway down the page, they won’t load until they need to be displayed.
Fast loading web pages are associated with more sales and higher ad revenue.
If you’re using WordPress, you’ll definitely appreciate the addition of native lazy loading.
Theme & Plugin Auto Updates
Now you’ll be able to automatically update your plugins and themes! Other than simply being convenient for many users, it’s also critical to protecting sites from attacks. Often plugin or theme updates are critical to prevent hacking.
Out of date plugins and themes are favored by hackers because they will still have the security gaps to be exploited. However, this new feature will help in the prevention of hacking because the window for exploiting security gaps will be much smaller.
Of course there will be the outlier cases where a plugin update might cause issues, and some WordPress users to choose to only manually update their plugins and themes. Sometimes this can be safer but rare.
By default the auto update function is turned off in WordPress 5.5. If it’s a feature you want to use, by all means, please go ahead and enable it.
Generally, this will be a new feature that many users will appreciate, especially small business owners who have much more to do during their day and want to keep their website updated without setting time aside just to check if a plugin or theme needs an update.
Sitemaps
Perhaps unsurprising, a sitemap is a map of your website. Sitemaps helps search engines navigate and index your site.
When you publish a sitemap, you’re telling search engines where all of your web pages are. This is particularly useful for telling search engines where new pages can be found.
In the past, WordPress users would use plugins to generate sitemaps, but now users won’t need a plugin to generate sitemaps. However, there are some limitations; such as the inability to generate image sitemaps.
If your website is image heavy, this will. be a concern because image sitemaps help search engines like Google know what a webpage is about and images can rank in search results.
So, this will be helpful new tool for many users, but if images are important to your site’s ranking, pay mind to the caveat of no image site maps.
End of Support for Old Browsers
The release of WordPress 5.5 ends the support for Internet Explorer 6 through 9. This is good because it means less code and a faster performing website.
Removal of Outdated CSS Styles
Code specific to IE 6-8 has been removed from WordPress 5.5.
In all likelihood this won’t affect visitors to your website. It might make things harder for malicious bots though, at least from our experience there are bots still using these old browsers and not actual humans.
Thanks to this change you’ll have. a shorter stylesheet and that means a faster loading website.
Older Browsers Lose Masonry Support
The masonry layout for libraries will be dropped for IE 9 and earlier. If you feel your site should continue to support these browsers and use masonry layouts, we advise you make the appropriate code changes.
Plugin Checking
With this release WordPress now has a way to check if a plugin is a rogue plugin and will stop the plugin from updating.
Summary
WordPress 5.5. “Eckstine” is a major update that adds a lot of new features that will allow for faster loading and easier to maintain websites.
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