Introducing WordPress 6.5! Packed with new features, bug fixes, and enhancements to boost your website management and content creation.
Before you update, don’t forget to run a backup of your site!
Before doing any major updates to the WordPress core, make sure you backup your website. We recommend making a complete backup that includes your WordPress database, WordPress files, themes, plugins, media library, etc., before proceeding with the update.
As a client of Good Websites, you don’t have to worry about these things. We manage all upgrades and backups for you as part of the WordPress Maintenance plan.
Block Editor Improvements
Each WordPress release adds improvements and new features to the Block editor.
Smart Overlay for the Cover Block
The Cover block includes a nice enhancement. It will automatically choose an overlay cover based on the image or the colour you use for the block.
Drop Shadow Effect
WordPress 6.5 adds a drop shadow effect option to the Image, Column, and Buttons blocks. You can also choose from a few different drop shadow styles.
Rename Blocks
We finally have a block renaming option. We already could rename the Group block (introduced in version 6.4), but now you can also rename individual blocks. Giving blocks descriptive names helps you better organize and understand the layout of your content.
Improved Link Control
Link control (the insert link popup) has had a notable change in WordPress 6.5. It highlights your blog and inner pages with different icons, and when you add a link, clicking on it will show a better context menu. You can see where the link goes, edit it, unlink it, or copy it with a click. Finally, you can choose to make a link nofollow out of the box.
Right Click for Block Settings in List View
The list view in the block editor gives you a bird’s-eye view of your content layout. Previously, you had to click on the three-dot menu next to an item to see the block settings. The three-dot menu is still there, but you can now right-click to access these settings.
Dynamic Gallery viewing with random order setting
A new setting in the Gallery block lets you display images randomly, creating a new image order with each page reload. You can activate this feature for each gallery individually.
The New Font Library
Manage fonts directly from your site editor. Install, remove, and activate local and Google Fonts with ease. Note: Font Library is only available within the Site Editor of block-based themes.
Refreshed Preferences Panel
WordPress 6.5 ships with a refreshed Preferences panel in the block editor. To access it, click on the three-dot menu at the top-right corner of the screen and select ‘Preferences.’ The panel now includes Appearance and Accessibility sections, along with improved categorization of previous sections.
Site Icon or Favicon
A site icon, also called a favicon, is a small image or logo in the web browser tab, bookmarks, history, and other places that help users identify your website. This tiny but significant graphic is crucial in branding and usability. With version 6.5, a streamlined method is available in General Settings.
Smoother drag-and-drop
Feel the difference when you move things around, with helpful visual cues like displaced items in List View or frictionless dragging to anywhere in your workspace.
Appearance Tools for Classic Themes
Classic Themes has gotten a significant upgrade, allowing for more subtle appearance customizations. You’ve got more control over Border customization, Color adjustments, Spacing control and Typography tweaks.
Better performance and Image Quality with AVIF Support
AVIF is a new image compression and quality standard that significantly outperforms older formats like JPEG, PNG, and WebP. By supporting the AVIF image format, WordPress 6.5 improves website performance by reducing image file sizes while maintaining image quality.
Performance updates
This release includes 110+ performance updates, resulting in an impressive increase in speed and efficiency across the Post Editor and Site Editor. Loading is over two times faster than in 6.4, and input processing speed is up to five times faster than in the previous release.
Under the Hood
This release also comes with many behind-the-scenes changes to improve performance, fix bugs, and give developers more options. 6.5 was one of the heaviest developer-focused releases we’ve had in a while. Here are some of those changes.
- An improved library is introduced to load translations much faster.
- Classic themes can now add support for appearance tools.
- The Block API now recognizes the viewScriptModule field in block.json metadata.
- WordPress 6.5 updates Block Hooks to make them more widely useful and includes some frequently requested new features.
- Updates to the HTML API, including the Tag Processor, which can now scan every token in an HTML document. It now supports more of the HTML specification than WordPress 6.4.
- Interactions to blocks with the Interactivity API