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Make sure you’re on WordPress 5.5!

If you’re behind one of the 30% of sites on the web that are powered by WordPress – this news is for you! WordPress has just launched Version 5.5 – nicknamed Eckstine in honour of American jazz-pop musician Billy Eckstine. The new WordPress is jam-packed with a range of fresh features to make web browsing smoother, faster and easier (we recommend asking your provider to make sure you get your upgrade!) 

Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a technique for loading images that involves only loading the image as it is about to come into view in the user’s browser. 

This benefits the viewer by being able to load the page faster and saving resources, bandwidth and battery life by not loading images they don’t scroll down too. For business owners, though, lazy loading is a fantastic feature that can potentially help your search engine rankings as Google will notice the faster page load times.

Up until now, this has been achievable in WordPress only by using additional plugins, but now this is baked into the WP core and available for all.

Sitemaps
An XML Sitemap is a roadmap to all of the important content within your site, and it helps Google and other search engines to understand the structure of your website and where the content lives. 

Sitemaps are essential in assisting search engines to find all content pages, posts, products and more within your site for indexing. As a feature that up until now has required an additional plugin, XML Sitemaps are now available out-of-the-box as part of the WP core. 

Security & Updating Improvements
You can now set whether you want plugins and themes to update automatically. Additionally, at a granular level, you can set some to auto-update and others not to. Conveniently, you can now also manually update themes or plugins by uploading a zip file via the browser, saving you from having to FTP into the website server.

Other Enhancements
This release also brings some accessibility enhancements (such as being able to copy the file URL in the media library with a button), block editor enhancements and a number of behind the scenes enhancements. It also includes a range of updates for developers:

  • Server-side registered blocks in the REST API
  • Standardized environment defining
  • New block editor Dashicons
  • New template loading functions
  • PHPMailer library update
  • More reliable cache invalidation
  • Updated bundled libraries, including SimplePie, Twemoji, Masonry, imagesLoaded, getID3 and clipboard.js.

 

Now, if that’s all technical mumbo-jumbo to you, don’t fret – that’s why Roobix takes care of the tech side of things! We offer website hosting, design and development to small and medium enterprises all over the world. Roobix web hosting plans include:

  • Cloud storage
  • Security checks
  • Malware checks
  • Image optimisation
  • Core updates
  • Plugin updates
  • Uptime monitoring
  • Performance checks
  • Priority support
  • Monthly reporting

 

The best way to get on a web hosting plan is part of our celebrated Managed Marketing Service, which gives you access to our team of in-house resources specialising in everything from strategy to SEO to graphic design. Why have one marketing person when you could have 60?

Call Roobix on 13 30 40 to have a chat about our web hosting plans and our MMS – we’re always happy to hear from you!

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