Being released on August 11th, 2020, WordPress 5.5 has been one of the most significant releases in the current year. WordPress, as it promises, offers extraordinarily excellent features in every update. Similarly, in WordPress 5.5, there is a great addition of features that make it more favourable for users.
You must be wondering what made WordPress release another urgent update this month on September 1st, 2020?
The Release of WordPress 5.5.1 is just a maintenance release to fix some bugs and issues that the users faced in WordPress 5.5. It caused a significant amount of damage to websites by breaking links, and many WordPress specialists were, therefore, compelled to switch back to the previous versions. However, the best thing about WordPress is that it does not keep a blind eye towards the problems and complains of its users and pays them
due respect.
How is WordPress 5.5 So Special?
WordPress 5.5 comes with lots of improvements and new features that make your online presence more exciting and work-friendly. The regular updates are what makes WordPress the preferred Content Management System over many other platforms present in the market.
Here is the list of WordPress 5.5 modifications and additions below.
1. Block Editor Modifications
WordPress block editor, normally known as Gutenberg consists of adding blocks complying to each item. The blocks are, in fact, different items that you add to your pages such as paragraphs, images, videos, galleries, audio, and more.
WordPress launches a Block Directory containing different WordPress plugins. You can use the search bar and find the feature or plugin that you want.
2. Modifications in Content Preview
Although Content Preview is not a new launch, it has been amazingly modified by WordPress. Previously, WordPress allowed the editors and writers to preview before the final publishing. However, the release of WordPress 5.5, the editors can now preview the content for multiple devices – such as how it appears on the desktop, mobile phone or tablet. Thus, it caters to the need of all android and iOS users.
3. Inline Image Editing
The inline images are very appealing to look at. But before this latest update, you had to open your image in the media library to edit (resize, crop or rotate) the image. However, WordPress 5.5 allows you to resize, crop or rotate the image within the editor. Isn’t it amazing?
4. Lazy-Loading Image Feature
Lazy loading may sound confusing in the beginning, but it is awe-inspiring in real life. The loading speed of your website or page strongly depends on the content and the images that you add. Images take more time to load; hence they slow down the overall loading of the page. The new release has solved this problem by default. Unlike before, when they started to load immediately when the page was accessed, now the images will load only when they are in range.
Don’t Miss-
Is Your WordPress Theme Misbehaving? Here’s The Fix
New Features: Benefits of WordPress 5.0 With the Old Version
5. Addition of XML Sitemaps by Default
The XML sitemaps are like roadmaps for a website which direct the search engine crawlers to look out for certain things in your website. In the release of WordPress 5.5.1, WordPress has added the XML sitemaps by default. Great, right?
XML sitemaps are supercritical from the SEO point of view. Many users are already employing sitemaps by some of the WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO and are pretty much aware of its importance. Moreover, if you are using a Yoast SEO sitemap, it will automatically disable the default sitemap. Hence, you can continue to use the one that you already have.
6. Automation of Plugin Updates
Updates are super crucial for a Website’s security and proper functioning. Since most of the attackers exploit the little voids that result because of the loopholes left in plugins, WordPress specialists are very perceptive about regular updates. This is to ensure that the websites are safe from any malware or hacker attack. From now on, the WordPress 5.5 release enables you to turn on the “auto-updates” for your plugins and themes.
Despite all the great and exciting features, WordPress leads to broken links for as many as millions of websites all over the web. However, since on the large it was considered as a success negating a few bugs and issues, WordPress introduced the patch version and released the maintenance update. All the problems that were discovered in WordPress 5.5, such as missing jQuery migrate, and pagination errors are fixed in the release of WordPress 5.5.1.
The Verdict
If we put aside some of the issues in WordPress 5.5, the rest of it was a complete success. So, the question of forsaking it should not arise in the first place, but if by chance it did. You should now confidently switch to WordPress 5.5.1 which will solve all of your previous concerns. Thus, the latest release is typically empowering WordPress 5.5.
