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Are you ready for WordPress 5.8 to be launched on July 20? While WordPress 5.8 is currently in beta phase 3, there are just a couple more weeks until tons of new features for building and maintaining websites will be available.
With this update, users will need to be prepared and comprehend the improvements that are being made to WordPress to allow users to edit their website from a viewer’s perspective. Understanding and comprehending the large impact editing a website has on the digital world is important.
Our WordPress web design team is ready to help guide you through all the new features WordPress 5.8 has to offer and how it might impact your site.
With Wordpress 5.8’s release, we will see the following improvements:
WordPress 5.8’s new template editing mode allows users to have control over website layout, look and feel. This versatile feature will let you easily switch between editing the design of the theme or the content on the page.
New theme blocks were introduced with the template editing mode to change your website template, which includes the ability to edit site content like taglines and titles while looking at the site as a user experience. You can also edit post features while the post is presented to you as if you were the audience. These edits include:
Other modifications you can change from a user experience view include your site logo or page list. This is a great new feature with WordPress 5.8, but you will want to still be cautious when making edits to your website. The template editor can affect multiple pages on a website if you edit certain areas like headers, footers, and overall site features.
While the template editing mode does give you some control over editing your theme from a user’s point of view, it is not a full website editing tool. (That’s where Integrity’s web development specialists step in.)
A second major area of improvement with WordPress 5.8 is an expanded block editor. Within the block editor, you can add and edit blocks to develop the layout of the page with new editing capabilities like being able to adjust padding between columns.
One new feature for the block outline indicator is a selector tool that will make selecting blocks to edit easier. Different views like the list view or outline will give you a complete picture of what is presented and included on your post or page.
An improvement that is eagerly anticipated by the creatives out there is image filters. Users will be able to select from preset and custom overlay filters on media blocks that contain galleries, images and cover images. These new navigation tools on the block editor make it easier to edit your theme or page.
The final major improvement with WordPress 5.8 is the ability to upload and implement WebP images. This is a relatively new standard for imagery created by Google. In comparison to a standard PNG, the WebP file type can reduce the image size by 26%.
Since WebP images are smaller files, this results in WordPress websites having the capability to load faster and use less bandwidth, but this is not an automatic improvement and will require some leg work to convert images to the WebP.
The only downside is that WebP imagery is only supported by Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and the Opera browsers.
A major move WordPress will be taking with the release of WordPress 5.8 is that there will no longer be support for Internet Explorer by the end of the year. Site visitors, plugins, and themes that are still being used will still look and feel as if nothing changed, but this will affect WordPress and its built-in features. While Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox are more often used nowadays, this is something to definitely be aware of if you are operating with Internet Explorer.
And, what you won’t be seeing anymore is the “Classic Editor” plugin. This shouldn’t be too impactful because most developers have installed the Gutenberg editor plugin which modernizes the way users create posts, pages, etc. WordPress seems to have caught on and is saying goodbye to the “Classic Editor.”
WordPress 5.8 is going to bring a lot of improvements to the game in making minor edits to your website from a user experience, but there still may be some limitations or frustrations you run into when envisioning and creating your website or web page.
WordPress 5.8 may be a website editor, but it will never be able to replace website developers. Knowing the right tools to utilize and how to improve website performance takes experts. The specialists on our WordPress web developers stay on top of the latest trends and are experts in building and customizing themes that will support and maintain your site.
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Have additional questions about how to use all of the new features released with WordPress 5.8? Contact our St. Louis WordPress web design agency today.
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