With this monthly episode, we will discuss the latest WordPress 5.5 release, five weeks ban on Astra WordPress theme and other security issues relates to WordPress.

Hey Everyone, Welcome to the latest episode of Blogging Monthly. This is Sanjeev Mohindra from MetaBlogue and in this episode, we will talk about the latest updates around Blogging and WordPress.

WordPress 5.5 Release

So, let's start with one of the biggest news of the month – WordPress 5.5. release. WordPress 5.5 is a major update that will bring a lot of performance improvement and editing enhancement to the core of WordPress.

WordPress 5.5 combines the Gutenberg update for version 8.5 and 8.6 to deliver major editing enhancements to the block editor. It also combines some of the basic requirements like XML sitemaps, Lazy Loading in the WordPress core. Earlier, webmasters were using external plugins to get these functionalities but now they can get these by default with WordPress.

Automatic Themes and Plugin Updates

The first change coming to WordPress Plugins and Themes is automatic updates. You can enable the automatic update for installed themes and plugin individually. Till now, webmasters have to use Jetpack or some other plugins to provide this functionality but now it has been integrated into the core.

This means now every webmaster can choose and select which plugins and themes can be automatically updated. You can also pick and choose to only select the items which you trust will not break your site. So automatic updates can be enabled for individual items.

Though I would have loved to add a pre-defined delay while enabling the automatic updates. Something like, update the plugin with 3-4 days delay after detecting a pending update. This way if there are any bugs or issues, you will have fixes rolled out before it breaks your site. I always update WordPress plugin and themes for my sites manually after waiting for almost a week from the updates rolled out date.

One hidden feature is the ability to block auto-update for specific plugins remotely. So, in case they find any issues with plugin or theme, they can set a flag at the repo level which can block the auto-updates. This is a good security feature to stop impacting multiple sites due to faulty codebase.

XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are one of the important requirements for good SEO. Till now webmasters have to rely on external plugins to generate XML Sitemap but now WordPress will generate the XML Sitemap by default. You can access the sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml URL of the site.

There are filters and hooks available to customize the Sitemap output which can be utilized to make changes in the final Sitemap. Though many webmasters might still depend on SEO plugins to create sitemaps which have already spend a lot of effort on customizing the output.

SEO Plugins like Yoast SEO or RankMath has already pushed the update to disable the WordPress Sitemap functionality since their Sitemaps are more customizable.

But this will be a useful feature for the sites which are not using any SEO...