Site Health
For the first time, WordPress has implemented a functionality in their new WordPress 5.1 version to start monitoring the health of your website. It’s a very important feature for large websites who use complex systems or eCommerce. In addition to that, for those people who are running outdated version of PHP will now recieve a notice when they login to their WordPress Admin Dashboard. Make sure that your PHP version is up to date. The current latest PHP version is 7.2 so if you’re website is lower than PHP version 7, than you are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible. Upgrade to PHP 7 also brings you more benefits such as website load time when browsing through your website.
Editor Performance
In this version of WordPress, the new block editor has been improved significantly. You will notice that it will load much quicker than what it used to. Of course, your server and php version needs to be up to date for you to benefit from this feature.
In the next few releases WordPress has mentioned that they will look in to further improving this plugin.
Multisite Metadata
Wordpress 5.1 introduces a new database tale that helps you store data between multiple websites. These data’s are arbitrary site data relevant to your multisite / network context.
Cron Job API
The benefit of using Cron Job is to automate tasks. Whether syncing calendar data from a third party source or pulling data from another website. This functionality now introduces a API form of Cron Job which allows you to do the same task in a much safer environment. Though if you would like to benefit from this feature significantly, WordPress recommends your servers to run on FastCGI and PHP version 7 or above.
A brand new JavaScript Build Processes
As we know WordPress has introduced a new JavaScript build option on WordPress 5.0. They have further developed this functionality.
Some other improvements
- Updates to values for the WP_DEBUG_LOG constant
- New test config file constant in the test suite, new plugin action hooks
- Short-circuit filters for wp_unique_post_slug(), WP_User_Query, and count_users()
- A new human_readable_duration function
- Improved taxonomy metabox sanitization
- Limited LIKE support for meta keys when using WP_Meta_Query
- A new “doing it wrong” notice when registering REST API endpoints