What’s new in WordPress 5.5?

WordPress has released its major version 5.5 on 11th August which is the second major release of 2020. If you are reading this post then you are definitely interested in knowing about the major changes and improvements in WordPress 5.5. All the improvements are discussed in detail in this article.

WordPress 5.5 is packed with improvements in 3 main areas which are:

• Speed

• Search

• Security

Apart from above mentioned improvements, block editor is also improved and more user-friendly in WordPress 5.5. If you are a developer there are also some changes for you in WordPress 5.5 which we will discuss in this article.

Speed

As page speed is also a main factor for ranking on Search Engines like Google so WordPress has now included a feature of Lazy Loading images which will work automatically and lazy load all the off-screen images. So, images will not load until they are just about to scroll into view. This will not only improve page loading time but also save the internet data of readers and preserve battery life because browsers on mobile will not load files which are meant for other devices. If you are reading this post then you are also one of those who have saved their data and battery because we are also using WordPress 5.5 on yourtechnologyguide.com.

Lazy Loading is just one factor for speed improvement. You have to make more improvements to speed up your website. Learn How to Speed up your WordPress Website to rank higher?

Search

Now WordPress will automatically create sitemap for your website. For those who are not familiar with the purpose sitemap, XML Sitemap is used by the search engines to read content of your website and index pages and posts. The older versions of WordPress were not able to create sitemap automatically but thanks to WordPress team for including this feature in WordPress 5.5.

However, the sitemap generated automatically by WordPress is quite limited in functionality and features so we will still recommend using sitemap from plugin like Yoast SEO. The use of plugin for sitemap will automatically disable the default sitemap of WordPress.

This is how sitemap generated by wordpress will look like. To access sitemap generated by WordPress for your site just place /wp-sitemap.xml after your domain. For example: example.com/wp-sitemap.xml.

Note: You can only see WordPress sitemap if you are not using sitemap generated by any other plugin.

Security

In WordPress 5.5 you can enable auto-update for plugins and Themes which will make sure you are running latest code which will be less vulnerable to security threats and hacking.

You can also turn auto-update off for any plugin or a theme. If you want to update plugin or a theme manually that’s also easy, just upload the zip file.

Enhancements in Block Editor

There are a lot of visual improvements in the block editor in WordPress 5.5 which makes it more user-friendly. I will discuss only a few noticeable improvements that will make real difference for the new bloggers.

Borders are clearly visible and you can add a new block by clicking the black (+) button which is clearly visible while you are writing within the block.

Images can be edited within block editor. You can adjust the height, width, aspect ratio, crop, or resize an image within block editor.

One of the most important improvements which I feel will be helpful for bloggers is the drag and drop feature for blocks. Now you can easily navigate and move blogs by just grabbing the block and dragging it in the desired location.

Changes for Developers

WordPress 5.5 also brings changes for developers with it. Some main changes are as under.

Changes in Rest API in WordPress 5.5

The new block types endpoints are added which ensures that JavaScript applications like block editor can extract definition for blocks that are registered on server.