The first major WordPress release of 2021, WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” was released on March 09, 2021.
This release is mainly focused on improvements and enhancements to the core and the Gutenberg Editor. With this release, the community can expect a more stable core and better support for plugins and themes.
Earlier, the beta version was released so that the community can test the features and report bugs to the core team (or post at the Alpha/Beta support forum). This is a great way of contributing to the community because it helps polish the codebase before the general release.
Before getting into the details, let’s see the major differences between WordPress 5.7 and 5.6 real quick.
| WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” | WordPress 5.6 “Simone” |
|---|---|
| WordPress 5.7 is more stable and contains all the features and bug fixes for the previous releases (66 enhancements along with 127 bug fixes). | The bug fixes and improvements of 5.6 are already present in WordPress 5.7. |
| Easily drag and drop to add blocks and patterns to your posts. | You can’t drag and drop block and block patterns from the inserter. |
| Lazy load iframes + lazy load images. | Only lazy load images. |
| WordPress 5.7 makes it easier to migrate your website to HTTPS. | It doesn’t offer any feature for migrating the site from HTTP to HTTPS. |
In the WordPress community, users are pretty excited about the new release. The discussions also center around making Gutenberg the primary editor for their websites as it now offers the drag-and-drop option for block placement.
Source: WordPress For Non-Techies by WPCrafter – Facebook Group
Also, users are now removing the Simple SSL plugin (5M+ active installations) and directly opting for WordPress 5.7 for migrating the websites to HTTPS.
What’s New in WordPress 5.7
Before updating your website to the new version, I highly recommend creating a staging site or test it at a local setup. If you are a Cloudways user, creating and setting up a WordPress staging site is a simple matter.
Here is a detailed guide on the importance of the staging environment and how you can create one for testing the compatibility of the new version with your existing codebase and plugins.
Now to update the WordPress version, you need to go to WordPress Dashboard > Updates, and click Update Now.
Once the upgrade finishes, you’ll see a welcome screen that has all the essential details such as what’s new and a list of contributors.
This time, the WordPress team has fixed a lot of bugs and issues in multiple areas including the Admin area, menus, widgets, and other components.
Let’s explore what’s new in 5.7.
HTTP to HTTPS Migration
You can now easily migrate a site from HTTP to HTTPS. As such, the HTTP URLs in the database will be automatically updated to match the site’s HTTPS URL.
Lazy Load iframes
Like lazy load images, you can now lazy load iframes by using the loading=”lazy” attribute for the iframe tag. This way you can reduce the page load time and memory usage.
Robots API
The robots meta tag helps you manage search indexing. In WordPress 5.7, you have the new filter-based Robots API that gives better control over the management of the robots meta tag.
Gutenberg Enhancements
In WordPress 5.7, the core team merged seven releases of Gutenberg (from 9.3 to 9.9), with a consequent increase in the interactivity and user-friendliness of the site editing process.
Highlights of the Gutenberg block editor include:
- Now, you can easily drag and drop individual blocks and block patterns from the block inserter into the post.
- You can now easily change the size of the social icons from the social icon block.
- You can change the alignment and set the width of a button block.
- With WordPres 5.7, setting up the font size for the list and code blocks is extremely simple and straightforward.
Wrapping It Up!
The WordPress team is continuously working to make things better and provide a seamless CMS (in particular, the site edit) experience. From every new release, you can expect exciting new improvements and enhancements to the core and editor.
There’s a lot more to WordPress 5.7 that you can check out on their official release page.
Farhan Ayub
Farhan is a community manager at Cloudways. He loves to work with WordPress and has a passion for web development. Mostly, he spends his time interacting with the people in the WordPress community. Apart from his work life, Farhan spends his time gaming and playing sports. Feel free to contact him at [email protected]
