Whats New in WordPress 6.3
In this quick video tour you’ll see the new features that have been added and what’s been removed in the latest WordPress 6.3 version.
BlogAid News subscribers will get exclusive instructions on how to do this update when I feel it is safe for us to do it.
Be sure to watch this video until the end because the Under the Hood section has some major changes that may impact our SEO and/or optimization that we currently have for speed.
Synced and Unsynced Patterns are the New Reusable Blocks
The biggest news is that Reusable Blocks are changing. They are now being merged with Patterns.
You can also have Synced Patterns that are just like RBs were so that when you change one, all of them change everywhere they are used on your site.
And you can also have Unsynced Patterns that work just like Patterns do now, and are similar to using an RB that you converted to a standard block. When you change an Unsynced Pattern, it does not change it anywhere else on the site, just in the at one instance.
With a Full Site Editing compliant theme you will go to the theme editor.
Then to Patterns in the Design section.
You will see any Reusable Blocks that you had previously created.
And you can create new Patterns and Template Parts here too.
There are a lot of tutorials that cover it.
But since most of us are not using FSE themes, I want to show you what this change looks like on a standard theme, like Kadence.
And you can see the Reusable Block I had created in WP 6.2.
You can embed them just as you did before.
But, if you want to create a new RB, just create your block.
When I click the More ellipsis, I now have the opportunity to Create pattern/reusable block.
A pop up appears where I can add the name.
And then I can choose to make it synced or not. If synced, when I edit one of them, all of them change all over the site.
If I turn this off, it becomes Unsynced, meaning that it is like converting to a regular block and any edits made to this one will not change any other instances where I might embed it again somewhere else on the site.
Let’s hope this change stabilizes Reusable Blocks for us.
2 New Blocks for Footnote and Details
Footnote
You can stop jumping through hoops now if you need to add citations to your content.
The footnote block has 2 parts.
The first the actual Footnote block that will be auto created at the end of your post/page with the link to the citation.
The second is is under Highlights in the block toolbar where you can add the number for the citation and the link.
Details
This is like an accordion block where you input the text you want to display and then users can click the down arrow to expand the section and get more details.
The hidden content can be anything from text to an image.
Be super careful with using this, or any accordion block, as the hidden text may not be available for SEO bots to crawl.
Minor Changes
There are a few small tweaks that you’ll notice in WP 6.3.
There is a new Preview icon in the top right.
On the toolbar, you have Add before and after instead of Insert, and you have Delete instead of Remove.
Layout Controls Improved
Some blocks have padding and margin styling controls.
Those have now been incorporated into the sidebar block controls to give a smoother experience of the tools, instead of having them in a separate pop out.
But, I have found these to be pretty uneven in which blocks have them and which don’t, and where you can find the settings as some are in the Styles tab
Cover Block Improvements
There is a new Layout option for the Cover block that impacts the nested content.
And, the Duotone color filter is now available for the Cover block as well.
2 Link Improvements
Open in New Tab Hidden
Opening links in new tabs/windows has always been a bad idea. Plus, it is a security issue. And it can bork some click tracking features, like for affiliate links.
I don’t care how much you like it, or think it helps folks return to your site, stop doing it. The practice has been out of vogue for 5 years.
And because of that, WordPress 6.3 has literally hidden the Open in a New tab option. You have to open the link editor and go to Advanced to turn it on.
If you are using Yoast SEO or some of the other SEO tools, you may see a different pop up on the link editor for setting the follow and sponsored options. Those are not native to WordPress. They come from the SEO plugin.
New Site Editor Features
If you have a theme that supports Full Site Editing (FSE), then you will want to check out these new features.
NOTE: The majority of us do not have FSE themes. So, if you don’t see some of these features, that’s why. Or, if you do see these features, they may not work as expected if your theme does not support them.
New Navigator – to help find templates or parts of templates to use.
Manage Patterns – your patterns can now be found in the site editor sidebar.
Preview Block Themes Live – under Appearance, you can do a live preview of an FSE theme.
Pages – under the Design tab is a new tab for Pages. It will show you a list of your recently accessed pages so you can continue editing. Or you can click the + button to create a new page from here as well.
Command Tool – hit / like you do for blocks and start typing. You can now search for templates and patterns and more.
Under the Hood Changes in WordPress 6.3
See other changes that you will want to check to see if it borks your site before you upgrade.
Drop PHP 5.6 Support
PHP is the main coding language used for:
- WordPress
- Themes
- Plugins
We are currently at version 8.x, with 8.0 being the most stable at this time.
There is no support for any versions below 8.0.
Using them puts your site at risk for security breaches.
It also makes your site slower to load.
With the WP 6.3 release, it will no longer support PHP version 5.6.
The minimum version is now 7.0.
I suspect with the next release or two they will no longer support PHP versions below 7.4, and a lot of site owners are still running on these unsupported versions.
I took BlogAid site audit clients through that update process back in Nov 2022 and we helped each other through any breaks, like for old plugins and themes that couldn’t handle PHP 8.0.
Plugin Rollback for Failed Update
When a WP update fails, there has long been a mechanism to roll it back.
Now WP wants to extend that functionality to plugins.
That’s great, but I’m advising my folks to continue using the WP Rollback plugin until this new feature has had time to season and be tested under multiple conditions.
Note that either of these methods only work on free plugins, not paid ones, as WP would not have access to the previous paid versions to do the rollback.
READ: How to Restore Plugins to a Previous Version for the method you need to use for all updates.
Image Lazy Load Improvements
There are 2 improvements in WP 6.3 for the way WP handles lazy load of images, which is much the same as the way browsers handle lazy load too.
Fetchpriority – will be applied to the most important image on the page.
Conditional Skip – this is for FSE themes to skip lazy load of any image in the header, like the logo.
While the WP and browser ways of doing lazy load are okay, it’s better to use an optimization plugin to do it with Javascript.
My preference is to use the caching/optimization combo plugin WP Fastest Cache.
It also loads the proper placeholder for the lazy load images so that your SEO is not negatively impacted.
Metadata Lazy Load
Images are not the only things that can be lazy loaded.
The metadata for the site can be lazy loaded as well.
WP 6.3 has improved the way it handles the loading of metadata, including:
- Term metadata
- Comment metadata
Term metadata includes info about your posts or pages like:
- Author
- Publish date
- category/tag
As I understand the change, WP will no longer do a check at the beginning to see if these terms exist and will only load them upon explicit request when needed.
We’ll see how this is coordinated with our caching/optimization plugin and how it impacts SEO, if at all.
Comment metadata includes similar info about comments, like:
- Author
- Date published
It will also be lazy loaded until explicitly requested.
Registering Scripts with Async and Deferred
One of the biggest issues with slow site load comes from scripts loading at the beginning.
These are considered render-blocking above the fold.
A good caching/optimization plugin, like WP Fastest Cache, can properly defer loading of scripts that are not actually required at the top of load so that your posts and pages render faster, meaning that the visitor can see the post/page sooner.
I don’t expect many plugin/theme devs to incorporate this right away beyond the ones that already have it.
And we’ll see how our caching/optimization plugins deal with it over time.
That’s It
What do you think of the new WP 6.3 changes?
And be sure to subscribe to BlogAid News for follow ups on tests that I’ll be doing on this new version too.
