Should you update to WordPress 5.0?
WordPress 5.0 was released on the 6th of December, which was somewhat of a surprise as it was only communicated to the digital community last week. While the new release potentially has some great advantages, It’s still early days, and we are advising clients to tread cautiously.
Our recommendation at this stage is to NOT upgrade without first consulting your web developer.
Following is an article posted by Joost de Valk, the founder and CEO of Yoast that offers an informed overview of the present situation…
“There are several decisions you should make before updating to WordPress 5.0:
- Is now the right time to update?
- Can your site work with Gutenberg?
- Do you need it?
is now the right time to update?
If you have a holiday coming up, or if this is a busy time in your company’s or site’s yearly calendar: postpone updating. Everything in this release will still be there in January. In fact, as multiple patch releases are being planned already, it’s probably going to be more stable in January.
can your site work with Gutenberg?
WordPress 5.0 introduces Gutenberg. Gutenberg changes the way the editor works in WordPress, read this post if you don’t know what it is. Overall, we think it’s an improvement.
But not all plugins are ready, and it’s important to know if the plugins you are using are ready before you hit update. If you only run Yoast SEO, you’re fine. If you run other plugins that integrate with the editing experience, make sure to check (either by testing or checking your plugins documentation) that they’re ready for, or at least “work with” Gutenberg. If they don’t, install and activate the Classic editor plugin before updating.
do you need WordPress 5.0?
If there is no compelling reason for you to update, our suggestion is going to be: wait. WordPress 5.0 will probably be more stable in January than it is now. Let’s be clear: we absolutely love Gutenberg and what Yoast SEO looks like in Gutenberg. The Schema blocks we’ve added are very cool. Yoast SEO is ready. We don’t think WordPress 5.0 is as stable as it should be.
So our advice boils down to: if you can wait, wait.
when you upgrade to WordPress 5.0
When you upgrade, please, as always: make a backup. If you have a staging environment, please use it. If you don’t have one, and your site is critical to your business, get one. This goes for every major software release though, not just this one.”
Content within this article was originally posted on yoast.com.
