What’s New in WordPress 6.4

See the important changes you need to be aware of before you update.

PHP Compatibility Warning

PHP is the main coding language of WordPress, plugins, and themes.

The PHP level you are using is set at your host.

You must be on at least PHP 8.1 before you update to WP 6.4.

I took my clients and webmasters up to PHP 8.1 back in the late spring.

And we’ll likely go up to PHP 8.2 by next spring, as soon as I feel that most of the plugins and themes we use are compatible with it, and when WP declares it is 100% compatible with it too.

Image Improvements

Background Images for Group Block 

Yay! This is a great new addition for the Group block. Now you can add an eye-catching image for the background.

Just ensure that it is super optimized for file size and will look good at any display size.

No More Attachment Pages

When you upload media, an attachment page is automatically created for it. It’s a super bad idea for these things to get crawled/indexed by search engines. In fact, one such slip up happened with the Yoast SEO plugin several years ago and it caused 100s of errors on sites with Google Search Console and too months to resolve it with Google.

WP 6.4 will have no attachment pages by default – but only for new installs, not for existing sites that just upgrade to 6.4.. 

There is currently no easy way to turn them off in existing installs, but I’m betting there will be down the road, likely in WP itself, or our SEO plugin or such.

So, don’t worry about finding code to do it for now.

Lightbox Popup to Enlarge Images

This is a good improvement if used properly. It’s a bad thing is misused.

In the Resolution section of the Image block settings, there is a new option to Expand on Click.

When a visitor clicks on the image, it will display an enlarged version in a lightbox popup.

That’s great for products if you have an e-comm site.

But keep in mind that you have to set the resolution as the full-size image – which you should be doing anyway for any images that will not be lazy loaded. 

But with it being full size already, the enlargement is going to be done by WordPress and it may look pixelated.

Here’s the bad thing about it, and where it will get misused.

If you have a gallery, you can set Expand on Click for each image.

And the gallery itself will be loading the full size images, even if it only displays a thumbnail in the actual gallery.

If those images are above the fold and not lazy loaded, that’s going to severely slow down page load speed.

So, use this feature if you need it. Just be careful about misusing it and negatively impacting your load speed, or presenting a bigger image that doesn’t look good.

Theme Improvements

New Font Library

There is a new Font Library in the Styles panel in the site editor.

It allows you to manage your typography for the whole site, including a way to host Google fonts locally, which is now a GDPR thing.

But, I don’t know if this only applies to fully block compatible themes, or all themes.

Personally, I would do it the way your theme provider says do it.

Performance Improvements 

Object Cache Changes

I left the WP Performance team because they wouldn’t listen to any voices of reason and kept trying to improve things that are actually outside of WP.

One of those things is Object Caching.

ANY changes with it MUST be coordinated with all other cache settings.

And that includes the choice to turn off object caching because in many ways it can be way more trouble than it is worth on some sites if not properly configured.

It also gets into the way each host provider handles Object Caching, including how they have it configured in their PHP settings.

But, the Performance Team has made the changes anyway.

We’ll have to see how this plays out with all caching plugins and hosts.

Improved Options and Autoloads for Plugins

For those of us who have to clean up the wp-options database table, or run down issues with autoload, this improvement is very much appreciated.

WP devs took a hard look at how plugins make use of wp-options and how many database calls are required each time a plugin loads.

They also looked at how plugins use the autoload feature.

And they made a way to cleanup both issues.

Now it’s up to the plugin devs to comply with these new methods, and I sure hope all of them do it sooner rather than later to help us have faster site loads.

But, this also means that purging all caches after doing a plugin update is going to be even more important.

Faster Template Loads

In WP 6.3, Block Patterns became even more useful because they were combined with Reusable Blocks so that you can now have Reusable Patterns.

Improvements have been made in 6.4 for better load time of the templates for the Block Patterns.

Faster Image Loading

This is not really going to affect us much, as we use better methods for lazy loading for images that do a better SEO job of it than the way WP does lazy loading (which is actually the same way browsers do it).

But, still good that they keep improving it.

Script Loading Improved for Defer and Async

Again, this may not affect us much as we use caching/optimization plugins that help reorder the load sequency of JavaScript files for faster page loads.

But, it’s still good to see WP continue to improve it at the core level too.

Style Handling

Our caching/optimization plugins also do a good job of deferring style files (CSS files) so that we have faster page loads.

And I don’t know how the WP 6.4 core changes for taking these out of the <head> and creating in-line styles is going to affect that.

Maybe some plugin and theme devs can tell us.

Other Changes in WP 6.4

Block Hooks – new feature that emulates the old theme hooks for the Classic Editor, but makes them available for creating dynamic blocks.

Error Messages on Login Page – The error messages on our login pages was not Accessibilties compliant.

So, changes have been made to both the layout and the fonts.

Admin Notification Functions – changed the way the HTML is handled by the notification to make it easier to maintain. The output is not escaped, so care has to be taken by plugin devs to do that.

Misc. User Interface Changes – slight appearance changes for consistency. 

HTML API – will make it easier for devs to find all instances of some items in DIVs and tags.