Our Favorite New Features in WordPress 5.5

by Kym Merrill

Aug 26, 2020 | Website Design

At Kite Media, we build all of our websites on WordPress. We love the ease of use and ability to completely customize sites that WordPress offers. And with their newest update, WordPress 5.5, there are even more cool features to love. Here are our favorite new features and what they mean for websites!  

Auto Updates

You’d be hard pressed to find a WordPress site that doesn’t use any plugins. We have our favorite plugins that we use on almost every site we build, and we think plugins are great! However, it’s important to keep plugins up to date, or you risk leaving your site vulnerable to hacking and other security issues. We used to update plugins manually, which requires you to check your site frequently for updates. Now WordPress 5.5 allows you to enable auto updates! You can set your site to automatically update plugins and themes, keeping your site more secure with less work. 

Lazy Loading Images

No one likes a slow website, and one of the biggest things that can slow a site down is images. Usually when a page loads, all of the images have to load, even the ones at the very bottom of the page that you can’t see yet. This can greatly slow down your page. WordPress 5.5 introduces lazy loading, which means that images are loaded when you scroll down to them, instead of all at once. We love this because it allows sites to load much faster, something that is better for both users and search engines!

Sitemaps

A sitemap is a list of all of the pages on your website. Sitemaps are important because they help search engines find all of the content on your website quickly and easily. Before WordPress 5.5, we used a plugin to create sitemaps. However, now WordPress can automatically generate sitemaps for you. All you need to do is submit the URL of the sitemap to Google Search Console and Google will know about every page on your site. 

Block Editor Updates

If you use the Gutenberg block editor to create your site pages, then you’ll love the new features released in WordPress 5.5. First is the ability to edit images right inside the image block. You can crop, rotate, and zoom photos right as you’re editing the page, saving you tons of time! There are also new block patterns that allow you greater control over your layouts. It’s easier than ever to create beautiful pages in WordPress 5.5.

 

Overall, WordPress 5.5 has some great features to make building a great website easier! If you don’t want to build your own website though, Kite Media can help! We’ve used WordPress to build sites for clients of all sizes across all industries, and we’d love to help you as well! Contact us today to learn more about our web design services!  

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