WordPress 6.0: what’s new?

Outstanding new features and faster performance: WordPress 6.0 “Arturo” has just been released, bringing almost 1,000 improvements, all with exemplary stability.
What are the key takeaways?

This is a rich and complex update, made possible by the contributions of more than 500 people in at least 58 countries. It focuses mainly on performance improvements and on Gutenberg, which now extends well beyond simply editing posts and pages.

Gutenberg takes centre stage

WordPress 6.0 introduces full site editing with Gutenberg. You can now use themes that support “full site editing” to lay out your site exactly as you wish – natively, without a page builder, and with excellent performance.

The work done by WordPress contributors on this release is remarkable, as the team proudly points out in its blog post:

Extending Gutenberg to the editing of an entire WordPress site meant tackling many complex challenges for the community. WordPress 6.0 is a fine example of the community’s deep commitment to meeting those hard challenges together. With thoughtful updates to the writing experience, improved blocks and a new style-switching slider, I am really proud of the work done in this release to deliver a superb site-editing experience.

Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director

Although Gutenberg divided opinion when it was first released, the tool is now extremely robust, which should win over even the most reluctant webmasters.

We showcased this feature on our blog, which currently uses the native WordPress theme “Twenty Twenty-Two”, customised with full site editing to match our main website. We can confirm that the possibilities are immense. If you would like someone to deploy a customised native theme for you, feel free to contact HaiSoft support, who can put you in touch with a webmaster.

Are page builders losing their edge?

Page builders let you edit an entire site, often at the cost of severely degraded performance. Since they have to reinterpret complex code and convert it into HTML on every page load, they are far from optimised.

WordPress can now natively handle many functions that used to be found only in page builders, with far better performance, since the code WordPress generates is plain HTML. In many cases, this calls into question the relevance and usefulness of page builders.

More and more native themes will support full site editing, offering greater customisation along with more elaborate stylesheets than WordPress’s “Twenty Twenty-Two” theme.

We can expect part of the page builder market to slow down or collapse. Their developers will probably now have an interest in focusing on additional features and the “all-in-one” approach, on animations or on more unusual block layouts. Nevertheless, since it is always wiser not to put all your eggs in one basket if you want your site to last, and since “all-in-one” solutions often lack specific features, a good proportion of WordPress users will probably opt for separate plugins.

Time will tell what the future holds for page builders, but they are very likely to lose much of their popularity in favour of a more native way of working with WordPress.

Better performance thanks to smarter request parsing

A code improvement now significantly optimises WordPress.

In plugins and themes, developers can use the do_parse_request filter to group requests and add a “hook” to load custom pages. These requests used to systematically trigger all the queries for posts, 404s and so on, resulting in unnecessary MySQL queries. By adding a return value to the parse_request method of the WP class, these queries can now be avoided.

In practice, this will improve loading times in a great many cases. We estimate that for some sites, loading time could be cut by more than half. For others, only a few milliseconds per page will be saved. Either way, it should bring a measurable performance gain in almost every case, which is always welcome.

Should you update?

According to the WordPress team, you should update as soon as possible:

For our part, we are seeing excellent overall stability and compatibility with existing plugins and themes. A very small number of outdated plugins may malfunction after this update – in any case a good opportunity to replace them, since they are no longer supported and may therefore contain security vulnerabilities.

Although the risk is very low, as with any major update we recommend, as a precaution, having a backup beforehand.

As a reminder, we can provide WordPress installation, updates and support through our WordPress plan.

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