Wordpress 5.5 update – Words of Caution!

If you’ve logged in to your Wordpress website this week, you may have seen an update available for WordPress 5.5.

Because this is a major release, we are slowly evaluating the compatibility of 5.5 with our regularly used suite of plugins by updating cloned versions of Client Sites on our staging server.

There are some exciting new features coming to WordPress (like lazy-loading images, new block editing features, and better accessibility), but as with any major release— there are also some concerns.

The most notable potential issue we see is that WordPress 5.5 has added the ability to turn on “auto-updates” for themes and plugins. While, on the surface, automatically keeping your software up-to-date might sound like a good thing, having worked with WordPress for as long as we have, we believe this could cause issues with software conflicts and in turn, cause your website to “break” without notice or warning.

This “feature” would circumvent the best practice systems and procedures we put in place via our Care Plans to ensure safe updates and, minimise the risk of conflicts and downtime for our Client Sites.

Our recommendation at this stage is that the Wordpress auto-update feature should remained switched off due to the high risk of problems it may cause!!

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out— that’s why we’re here!