What’s New in WordPress Version 5.6 – Misc Enhancements

Video Transcript

To close out this set of classes on the additions and changes to WordPress with the update to version 5.6, I wanted to cover some of the stuff under the hood, so to speak, like the expanded auto updates feature, the improvements to the site health tool, and a couple of other things that for most of us users are not even going to notice.

I’m going to begin with the site health tool. Now, most if not all, the improvements to the site health tool, we’re not even going to see but at the very least, I want to take this time to remind you that you do have a site health tool, by the way, and if you haven’t used it in the wild, now would be a good time to check it out. Now, granted, whenever the site health tool first came up a couple of major versions ago, it did have its fair share of issues, but it has improved with age. So just as a reminder, under Tools, once you’re logged into the admin area under Tools, we’ve got the site health link right here, or on your dashboard, if you have this module activated.

And if you don’t, you can activate it under screen options by making sure that box is ticked because if it’s not ticked, you’re not going to see it. So make sure that box is ticked. And you can access the same stuff either by clicking on the link here from this module on your dashboard, or, again from tools. And clicking on site health. Either way, you’ll end up on this page here, you can see how that circle is blue. That means it is checking stuff out. Now if you haven’t been here in a while, then it might take a little bit longer to turn green, or yellow or red depending upon what issues it might have found. Now in my case, it’s found recommended improvements, nothing critical, but simply improve. And second really make things better. As you can see here, my site health is good. So in other words, if I’ve got more pressing matters on my plate, then I’ll go ahead and take care of those instead of messing with this stuff. But if we open one of these up, it gives you some pointers on what you can do to improve that particular item. So definitely worth checking out. I’m going to come back here later on and show you the info section. But that’s the site health tool.

Oh, and one of the biggest improvements to the site health tool is one of those items that we just as users will not be seeing. The way that it used to work was through your site’s admin Ajax, which sucked up a lot of resources from your hosting account that has now changed to running on a dedicated REST API endpoint. So your overall site performance improves as a result. Next up is the application passwords feature. Now this feature allows third party apps like plugins to connect to your site by way of an encrypted connection via a password that you set. And you can revoke this access at any time. Let’s go and have a look at where this is. Go to users. Your profile. Then down here at the bottom is application passwords. Now just a quick Adam, I want to emphasize this is not nor should it be your login password. But instead, it should be a hard to guess string of characters, like any other strong password should be. Like it says here you simply put in the name of that plug in or application, then click on this button here to add new application password to that item. And then repeat that process with other applications that require application passwords.
Now, since this is fairly new, I personally do not have any applications or plugins that require this feature or that work with this feature. So I can’t really show you how it works in action. But at least now you’ll know what they’re talking about, and where to go to set it up and monitor it whenever a particular plugin or application says hey, you need to set up an application password for this to work. Again, that’s under your profile and users.

Now another under the hood item is the support for different PHP versions. Without getting too deep in the woods here, just know that you should be using a version of PHP that begins with the number seven, ideally 7.4. And of course that number is going to go up as time goes on. My point there is that you do not want to be using a version of PHP version 5.6 because one of the updates to WordPress 5.6 is the dropping of support for PHP 5.6. And if you’re not sure what version of PHP are using, let’s head on back over that site health tool. And we’re going to get to there from our tools, site health and click on the info link.

And we scroll down a bit. This information tells us all about the stuff that makes our site work. For example, under server, the PHP version, ideally this should be 7.4 but at least ways it’s not version 5.6 because I would look pretty silly if it was but this just tells you a little bit more about the stuff that makes your site work. work the way that it does. Now, I’ve saved the best for last. And I say that jokingly. And that is the auto update feature that was added in version 5.5. For the themes and plugins, has now been added for the major updates to the WordPress core files.

Now just a reminder of what I went over the first class of this little mini series, we don’t do major updates immediately, we do minor updates immediately, because those are mostly security patches, the major updates like version 5.6 of WordPress, for example, we hold off on for a few days. So we do not want them auto updating themselves as soon as they come up. So in other words, you want to disable or make sure that that feature inside of WordPress 5.6 is disabled. Let’s have a look. While I’m back up here to dashboard and in the flyout, click on updates. And this is the page you’ll end up that if you have any updates to plugins or themes or major versions, or even minor versions, right here is that auto update feature for major versions.

Now in existing sites. This is what it’s going to look like enable automatic updates for all new versions of WordPress, that tells you that this is currently disabled. This is what it looked like if it’s enabled. Basically, this is what you don’t want it to so this site is automatically kept up to date with each new version of WordPress, you don’t want that. So you want to switch back to automatic updates for maintenance and security. That’s the minor releases.

Okay, so again, this is on existing sites. However, if you have a brand new site, this is going to be automatically on, you want to come in and disable that so that all you have automatically done is the maintenance or security releases the minor releases. So existing sites you’re set just leave it the way that it is brand new sites you want to toggle this off so that yours looks just like this.

That’s going to bring us to the end of this class on the miscellaneous speed and security enhancements to WordPress in version 5.6. Thanks for checking it out and you have a great day.