WordPress 5.5 Highlights and Features (Infographic Included)

WordPress 5.5

WordPress was recently released the latest version of WordPress 5.5. In this article let’s discuss the highlights and features of WordPress 5.5 including the WordPress 5.5 Infographic.

We know WordPress is one of the most used and reliable CMS (Content Management System) globally. It comes up with some amazing features in the latest version WordPress 5.5. Some of the features are really impressive and most liked.

The awaited version WordPress 5.5 name “Eckstine” was released on August 11, 2020. Lots of custom modifications have been made in this version to take the overall website performance to the next level.

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WordPress 5.5 Earlier Releases

Here’s the list of all the earlier release of WordPress 5.5 version,

• August 11, 2020 – WordPress 5.5 “Eckstine”
• August 4, 2020 – WordPress 5.5 Release Candidate 2
• July 28, 2020 – WordPress 5.5 Release Candidate
• July 27, 2020 – WordPress 5.5 Beta 4
• July 21, 2020 – WordPress 5.5 Beta 3
• July 14, 2020 – WordPress 5.5 Beta 2
• July 7, 2020 – WordPress 5.5 Beta 1

WordPress 5.5 Highlights and Features

Here are the key highlights and features of WordPress 5.5.

1. Speed – Lazy loading
2. Sitemap
3. Auto-Updates for themes and plugins
4. Block patterns
5. Inline image editing
6. Block directory
7. Improved editor UI and appearance

1. Speed – Lazy loading

The pages and posts of your WordPress website or blog load faster than before. The new feature of Lazy Load makes the images to lad only when the user comes to the focus area by scrolling down the page or post.

In addition, it increases page performance, reliability, user experience, and helps the users to stay on the page for a long time.

2. Sitemap

WordPress 5.5 comes with default XML Sitemap. A sitemap is very essential for every website or blog to let the search engines know whenever a new page or post is published. The default sitemap helps the search engine to discover your pages immediately by users.

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3. Auto-Updates for themes and plugins

Updating the plugins and themes are no longer a manual process hereafter. WordPress 5.5 added a feature to auto-update the plugins and themes. So, you can find the column Automatic Updates in the plugin page with Enable auto-updates option as shown in the below image.

Also, you can find the Theme auto-update by navigating to Appearance -> Themes -> Click on the theme as shown in the below image.

The plugins and themes can be updated by uploading the ZIP files.

4. Block patterns

Introducing block patters to build beautiful layouts for your website or blog without installing any 3rd party plugins. Firstly, It offers basic ready-made patterns like heading, button, columns, a gallery that can be inserted anywhere on the page and edited. It is easy and simple to build the layouts.

5. Inline image editing

Image editing functions like cropping, rotating and scaling can be performed right from the image block after uploading the image to WordPress. Therefore, It drastically reduces the time spent on image editing.

6. Block directory

Block directory id another great feature should talk about. It allows the users to search, select and use a specific block which isn’t available in the block editor by default.

For example, the product slider isn’t available in the default blocks, you can search and add it to the page as shown in the below image.

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7. Improved editor UI and appearance

Apart from the above major features, WordPress 5.5 made some changes in the appearance of elements and it’s icons. Moreover, It gives a smoother look and easy to navigate between the blocks. Device selection is added to the preview section. And more minor changes have been made.

List of all the highlights and features of WordPress 5.5

• Accessibility improvements to widgets outputting lists of links in 5.5
• Controlling Plugin and Theme auto-updates UI in WordPress 5.5
• Controlling Plugin and Theme auto-update email notifications and Site Health Infos in WP 5.5
• Recommended usage of the Updates API to support the auto-updates UI for Plugins and Themes in WP 5.5
• Themes: changes related to get_custom_logo() in WP 5.5
• WP 5.5 Core Editor Accessibility Improvements
• New editor preview options
• Block API Updates in 5.5
• Block Patterns in WP 5.5
• Editing Images in the Block Editor
• New Block Tools on WP 5.5
• Various changes to WordPress React Components in WP 5.5
• Proposed Block Directory guidelines
• You can now add your own plugins to the Block Directory
• Lazy-loading images in WP 5.5
• REST API changes in WP 5.5
• Register theme feature API
• Registering default values for metadata
• New XML Sitemaps Functionality in WP 5.5
• New esc_xml() function in WP 5.5
• Themes field guide: WP 5.5
• Miscellaneous Developer Focused Changes in WP 5.5
• External Library updates in WP 5.5: call for testing
• Passing arguments to template files in WP 5.5
• Opcode Cache Invalidation in WP 5.5
• Filtering archive page headings in WP 5.5
• Introducing createInterpolateElement
• New wp_get_environment_type() function in WP 5.5
• Better fine-grained control of redirect_guess_404_permalink()
• New CSS styles for buttons with the disabled state in WP 5.5
• Dashicons in WP 5.5 (the final update)
• PHP related improvements & changes: WP 5.5 edition

WordPress 5.5 Highlights and Features – Infographic

Here’s an infographic that gives an overview of the WordPress 5.5.

Use this infographic on your blog – Copy paste the below HTML code.

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Check out all the latest updates on the official website now!

WordPress 5.5 Highlights and Features – Conclusion

To sum up, this is of the best WordPress update ever with lots of changes and improvements. This is the second WordPress update for the year. There’s no doubt, the features and highlights of the WordPress 5.5 update will definitely make us feel the changes in the website or blog performance.

The developer updates will really help the WordPress developers to understand the platform better and to customize the theme and increase the performance even better than now.

Let’s take advantage of the new update and make more effective content in the coming days.