WordPress Update 5.5 – What You Need To Know

Hey, guys, Carrie here with a quick rundown about the new WordPress 5.5 update. Not everyone uses WordPress, but lots of marketers do and I recommend it for my clients.

This update is a major update and one you should take note of because there are definitely some changes you need to know about.

There are, get this, over 450 improvements and bug fixes with this version. Yep, you heard that right! And, no, I’m NOT going to go over each of them. Just the ones that you really should know about.

So the first one that I think is important for you to know about is that the new update includes Lazy Loading natively. Essentially what this emans is that your pages will load faster. (Yea!)

It loads images and videos later in the process so visitors don’t have to wait for everything before they can scroll down the page.

Another imporant update is Theme and Plugins Auto Update. This is a time saver, and makes your site more secure. Lots of hacks come from outdated plugins, so these updating automatically can improve site safety.

HOWEVER, you have to turn this feature on for it to work. (DO IT!)

BUT, remember if you have some issues with your site, that will be the first place to check for issues, too.

WordPress has added sitemaps. I’m not sure yet how I feel about this one. First off it doesn’t include an image sitemap. The concept is great, but I also really like the plugins I currently use for this. I haven’t checked yet to see if this is optional, but hopefully it will be until I see if it works well or not.

Another thing to really be aware of is that this update deprecates support for older browsers. That means outdated css styles are removed.

And last, but certainly not least, in fact, perhaps the biggest one of all which I am not really wild about to be honest, is it installs a backdoor.