WordPress 5.0: What You Need To Know To Get Ready
WordPress has become one of the top content management systems around, thanks to its user-friendly interface, and the ability to create versatile and high-performance websites. With so much functionality, thanks in huge part to the massive variety of plugins available, WordPress has helped numerous companies, organizations, and brands establish their online presence.
This 2018, WordPress will be launching its biggest update yet, which is WordPress 5.0. This update aims to not only optimize the performance of WordPress but also make it more accessible and user-friendly for new users as well. Like all upcoming updates, it is important to ensure that your website would be prepared and ready for it. Here are the important things that you need to know to ensure that you and your website would be ready for the upcoming update.
Gutenberg Editor
One of the newest features of WordPress 5.0 is the new editor interface, which aims to make creating and editing content much easier and more convenient compared to previous versions of WordPress. While we would not be able to access the full features of the new update, we at least get to experience how the new editor would be like through the recently-released Gutenberg editor interface.
This plugin was released with the intention of creating a more reliable and user-friendly interface, along with helping WordPress users adjust to the new updates as well. Let’s take a look at the new features of this editor.
One of the first notable new features of the Gutenberg editor is called Blocks. This new feature allows users to be able to add multimedia content with much more ease than before, only needing a few clicks to add them to your content. As you can see in the demo below, users have the option of adding different kinds of blocks. For this instance, the block added was for a cover image.
Along with adding cover images, Gutenberg offers at least 15 different types of blocks that allow you to create your own posts.
This new feature helps make creating content much more seamless and establish a more interactive system that more users would be more comfortable with using. If you want to try out the new Gutenberg editor out for yourself, you can go to their site to try out some of the new features and download the plugin.
Plugin Compatibility (or Incompatibility)
Plugins have helped WordPress become the most versatile CMS around, allowing users to perform a wide range of tasks and functions that help them create the website that represents their brand and their content. With WordPress 5.0 about to arrive soon, one of the main concerns of many users was compatibility.
A lot of websites (including the ones we manage) require a good number of plugins to function properly and having compatibility issues is surely the last thing that we would want to happen. Fortunately, one piece of good news that WordPress users would be happy to hear is that by the time 5.0 comes out, plugin developers would have been able to update to ensure compatibility with the new update.
Plugins help websites run properly and ensuring that the new update does not compromise these functions is essential to ensure optimal performance.
How to Get Ready
Test out the Gutenberg Plugin
As intended, the first thing that you have to do in order to be able to adapt to WordPress 5.0 is to download the Gutenberg Editor Plugin and test it out. While the interface and functionality are now much simpler, the amount of new features is worth checking out. Learning how to make full use of the Blocks will help you craft quality content that would look good and represent your branding.
Currently, the Gutenberg Editor is at the beta stage, which means numerous improvements have yet to be made to ensure the best results. If you have tried out the plugin yourself, it is best to voice out your early impressions of it to ensure that any concern would be addressed by the time you have the final product.
For optimal testing, I suggest you post a few articles using Gutenberg that feature a variety of Blocks to see how they look and perform.
Backup your content
While this may come off as too drastic, there’s no harm in backing up your website content before the new update arrives. This ensures that should there be any issues with the current version of your WordPress site, you are guaranteed that you would not lose content. There are a good number of plugins that allow you to back up your data and getting one (if you haven’t already) ensures that you would not have trouble with data recovery.
Key Takeaway
WordPress has been our CMS of choice for a good number of years now, and this update is truly something very big. Rolling out soon, WordPress 5.0 aims to make WordPress a more accessible and reliable platform that enables content creators to craft their own website with ease.
If you have questions and inquiries about WordPress and SEO in general, leave a comment below and let’s talk.
