WordPress 5.5 is out now. It’s a major update. This is what’s happening, in plain English.

WordPress 5.5 is a major update. It has over 450 improvements and bug fixes. These are the major changes you should know about in plain English.

Lazy Loading

Perhaps the most exciting change to WordPress is the addition of native lazy loading. Native means that the feature is built-in.

Lazy loading makes your site perform faster.

What makes this feature great is that you don’t have to do anything. It sets itself and your site is faster.

Lazy loading is a method for postponing the download of images and videos that aren’t on screen or needed.

This means that everything else that a web page can be used by a site visitor faster. The reason is because the browser doesn’t have to wait for everything to download.

As a site visitor scrolls down the page, the images and videos are downloaded when the visitor needs it.

Fast loading web pages are associated with more ad revenue and more sales.

Native lazy loading is an beneficial upgrade for WordPress publishers.

Theme and Plugin Auto-update

WordPress is introducing a feature that will automatically update all themes and plugins.

This is an important feature because some updates are critical for preventing hacking attacks.

Hackers often are able to hijack a site because of out of date plugins and themes.

This new feature will prevent that kind of event from happening. This will help keep a site hacker-free.

Auto-update is useful for sites that don’t change very much and don’t use a lot of plugins.

There are edge cases where a plugin update might introduce unwanted issues. That’s why some publishers prefer to manually choose which plugins to update and when.

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