Securing Your Websites With New WordPress Update

Security should be a top priority if you have an online presence. And if WordPress is your content management system (CMS), security must be at the top.

WordPress is the most widely used CMS, powering over 30% of all websites running on it. However, as WordPress becomes more popular, hackers are taking notice and targeting WordPress sites specifically. If you don’t take certain precautions, you could be hacked. As with anything technology-related, you should check the security of your websites.

WordPress issued a security update to address two vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to take over the entire site. A stored cross-site scripting (Stored XSS) vulnerability is more critical of the two. The third major version release for 2021 was postponed to January 25, 2022. WordPress 5.9 is a major version that was supposed to be released in December 2021. 

WordPress 5.9 Version

WordPress version 5.9 is a major milestone for the WordPress community as it includes significant improvements to the full site block editing capabilities. Full Site Editing is a critical feature that allows a publisher to edit every aspect of a website using the Gutenberg block interface. The goal of the Gutenberg block-based interface is to make WordPress more user-friendly by incorporating a visual interface.

New Features Added to WordPress 5.9 

• Full Site Editing: The classic WordPress editor has been replaced by a new full site editor and a global style interface, providing new full site editing experiences. The new global styles panel makes it simple to customise site-wide styles.

• Navigation-Menus: The navigation block and navigation screen projects have been in use for a while and are one of the main goals of the WordPress 5.9 version. Much of the remaining work focuses on improving the user experience, reducing complexity and testing as many themes as possible. 

• New Default Theme: Every year, WordPress releases a brand new default theme. Twenty Twenty-Two is the new default theme in WordPress 5.9. This is the first block theme designed for complete site editing. The theme’s creator focused on making the theme editable via theme.json and the new editor, which resulted in minimal CSS usage. 404 error pages, single post pages, and archive pages are just a few of the page templates available in Twenty Twenty-Two. A footer and three different types of headers are also included in the template parts: default, dark with a small style, and dark with a large style. 

• Performance Improvement: To improve loading speed, a new lazy-load modification has been implemented. WordPress 5.9 now supports PHP 8.1 and includes an enhancement to the PHP testing framework for improved compatibility.

• New Features for Developers: WordPress 5.9 introduces several new developer-friendly features.

1. Theme.json Support for Child Themes: Theme.json inheritance makes it easier to create a child theme in WordPress 5.9. Simply create a new folder in the public HTML/wp-content/themes directory for the child theme and add the style.css file.

2. Lock Attribute for Blocks: In the block settings of WordPress 5.9, a new lock attribute was added. Block developers can use this feature to prevent users from moving or removing individual blocks.

3. Multiple Stylesheets: For each block, developers can now specify a different stylesheet. Other blocks’ styles can also be loaded by including a style or style string in the block.json file. As well as stylesheets can be added to a block. This saves your time by allowing you to reuse styles from other blocks without having to duplicate them.

• Block and UX Improvement: Many WordPress users spend the majority of their time in the block editor, creating and managing content. As a result, this new WordPress release includes numerous block editor enhancements, such as a better user interface and new blocks.

Final Thought

The full site editing experience has been improved with the addition of a block editor, various new design tools, and UX improvements in WordPress 5.9. The new default theme is also a great place to start for new WordPress users because it has so many templates and pattern options. Bug fixes and new compatibility tools, as well as features to improve web development and design, are all included in WordPress 5.9.