What’s New in WordPress 6.1

WordPress 6.1 is packed with improvements and will roll out Nov 1 2022.

In this video I’ll take you on a tour of what’s new in WP 6.1.

Links Mentioned

• List of all the blocks that have each of the styling options
• Find My Blocks Plugin Tutorial
• BlogAid News
• Site Audit service
• WP Fastest Cache Settings
• The full list of Accessibility Improvements in WP 6.1
• Accessibility category of posts on Codefetti

Video Tour

Transcript

Block Editor Improvements

A big focus for WP 6.1 was to bring standardization of styling options to more blocks.

There is now a list of all the blocks that have each of the styling options.

Be sure to see the link above or below this video so you can bookmark it for reference.

Dimensions Added to More Blocks

One of the new styling options added to more blocks is Dimensions for setting the margin and padding.

Block Spacing Added

You can also now adjust vertical and horizontal spacing for items in blocks that support this feature.

Borders Added

More blocks also have borders now too.

Move Items in List Block

Editing the order of items in a List Block has been at best, tricky.

WP 6.1 adds an up/down arrow so you can select an item in the list and change its position.

Featured Image in Cover Block

Some site owners want to use the cool effects of the Cover block and put their Featured Image in it.

Well, you can do that now.

When you open the Cover block, there is a new choice to Use featured image.

I would caution you to check if it’s using the original image or a thumbnail, though.

If you’re using Squoosh to optimize your images prior to upload, you need the original image to get the Progressive render. If it uses a thumbnail, you lose that and it may use Baseline rendering, which is slower.

And considering that this is usually at the top of a post and lazy load will not be applied, that matters for initial load speed.

Consider Dropping Other Specialty Block Plugins

Like me, you may be using specialty block plugins from other theme devs, like UAG/Spectra, Kadence Blocks, GeneratePress Blocks, or even Genesis Blocks.

With the release of WP 6.1, most of the commonly used native blocks now offer the same styling choices as those speciality block plugins.

So, I would invite you to seriously consider replacing those 3^rd party blocks with WP native blocks each time you update a post or page.

SEE: Find My Blocks Plugin Tutorial for an easy way to help you do that.

Block Editor Sidebar Changes

The right-side Post/Block sidebar will look a little different to you in WP 6.1.

Post Tab Changes

For the Post tab, the Status & visibility section is now called Summary.

And the URL and Template info is near the top now.

And for that Template link, you click on it to change the template type. I think this is super odd and Template should have remained in its own section.

I don’t know where the Stick to the top of the blog checkbox went, but so few folks used it anyway.

Publish Layout Changes

The schedule post layout got a makeover too, and honestly, I’m not a fan of the new layout. The info is all spaced out instead of being all together.

Now you have to scan instead of just glance at the info.

This may have been part of an Accessibilities improvement, but I’m not sure it’s improved.

Cron Bug Fix

Boy, am I ever glad they got around to addressing this issue.

WP has an internal clock called WP-Cron that runs your scheduled events, like auto backups and publishing scheduled posts.

And that clock has to be wound up periodically. They use pings on the site, like visits from humans and bots to do that.

And the whole thing has had issues with LiteSpeed servers for years, especially in 2022.

That issue has finally been addressed. And we should see improvements with any plugins that are reliant on cron, like our backups.

However, I have already taken care of this issue for my clients with a special line of code in the .htaccess file, as all of us are on LiteSpeed hosting servers because they are the fastest.

Get Special Update Instructions

My BlogAid News subscribers are the only folks who get my special WP update instructions when I deem it is safe for us to upgrade.

Look for the link above or below this video to subscribe.

Speed Improvements

All of your content is held in your site’s database at your host.

So, each time a visitor requests a post or page, that info has to be retrieved from the database – every time.

The WP devs have now added caching to wp_query that will hold a request in cache for a certain period of time and that cached version will be served to the next visitor who makes the same request.

What’s important about this is that you do have an I/O limit at your hosting, which is input/output to the database.

So, this change not only speeds things up by not having to query the database again, it also saves on your I/O usage.

And, improvements have been made to the REST API database queries too, and that will speed things up as well.

Cloudflare improves database queries and speed even more

That’s all great, but what’s even better is that Cloudflare does an even better job of both of these things. And that’s why me and all of my clients run our sites through Cloudflare.

FYI, there are 30+ Cloudflare settings that need to be configured properly for you to get max speed and security. And you most definitely do not want to hook up Cloudflare through your hosting.

Get a Site Audit

If you’re ready for a super fast and secure site, be sure to see my Site Audit service.

Faster Image Handling

WP 6.1 has also improved its native lazy load feature of deferring images that are below the viewport, meaning they are not currently in the screen that the visitor is viewing.

That’s great, but a good caching/optimization combo plugin like the paid version of WP Fastest Cache is going to do a better job of this.

READ: WP Fastest Cache Settings for how to properly configure it.

Accessibility Improvements

I am thrilled that WP has made a priority out of shoring up Accessibility issues.

Many of those improvements are on the admin side, especially when viewing on smaller screens, like phone and tablet.

And there were multiple improvements to the Block Editor, Site Editor, and Template Editor for Full Site Editing too, including LOTS of ARIA labels that were missing.

And there were several improvements to comments, especially the text surrounding the fields.

READ: The full list of Accessibility Improvements in WP 6.1

READ: Accessibility category of posts on Codefetti to ensure your site is in full compliance. And if you got a 3^rd party solution for your site, yeah, you’ll want to see why that’s not really working for you and how it may even put a target on your site.

Full Site Editing Improvements

As with the last 1.5 years of releases, WP 6.1 has a slew of Full Site Editor improvements. I’m not going to cover them here as I seriously doubt most of you are using any of them.

What I will say is that the bugs with FSE after the public release are what hold up us getting a point release, like 6.1.1 for 2-3 weeks that also addresses the type of bugs that most all site owners are encountering.

We would be a lot happier if they would get out that first point release with the non-FSE bug fixes right away and then go back to work for however long they want on the thing most of us are not using anyway.

Wrap Up

I’m thrilled that WP is finally getting on the ball with standardizing block styling, speed, and Accessibility compliance instead of the whole focus being on Full Site Editing.

Let’s hope they continue with that balance for all releases in 2023.

Be sure to subscribe to the BlogAid YouTube channel for more helpful tips just like this one.