New with WordPress 5.5.
Speed. The speed of a website is important, Google prefers faster loading websites as a faster website provides a better experience for the visitor.
With WordPress 5.5 posts and pages feel faster, thanks to lazy-loaded images. Images give your company story a lot of impact, but they can sometimes make your site seem slow. So it advisable to make sure you optimise your images, size them about 1000 to 1500 pixels wide and reduce the resolution (they don’t have to be high-resolution images unless you are printing). In WordPress 5.5, images wait to load until they’re just about to scroll into view. The technical term is ‘lazy loading’.
On mobile, lazy loading can also keep browsers from loading files meant for other devices. That can save your readers money on data – and help preserve battery life.
Search. Add a sitemap for search.
WordPress sites work well with search engines, especially if fresh rich content is added. For example; updates from your company, case studies, answered FAQs etc. A site map is a way of letting Google and Bing etc to know which pages you want crawling and telling them your site has been updated. This can produce much better search results and in some cases, a multi-linked SERP map (search engine results page map).
We at Zedcomms always add a site map to our client’s sites using plugins such as Yoast or All in One SEO but now this feature is included with the latest WordPress software. WordPress 5.5 includes an XML sitemap that helps search engines discover you’re most important pages from the very minute you go live.
So, more people will find your site sooner, giving you more time to engage, retain, and convert them to subscribers, customers, or whatever fits your definition of success.
This is a good move for WordPress.
Tip – Hit update just once; When updating your WordPress site to 5.5, click the update button only once. It looks like it has not responded, wait a while and it will do the job. Hit it a few times and the site may get – lest say confused.