What’s new with WordPress 5.4 and WooCommerce 4.0

If you have a WordPress site, you will know that updates for WordPress come out A LOT! You will also know that sometimes, it’s not a good idea to just blindly hit that “update” button and think everything will be OK! You’ve probably been hit with that horrible white screen of death as a result. This is why our WordPress Maintenance Package is so popular – we take care of all this stuff for you!

The reason why these updates sometimes break your website is because they may contain major file changes. We also recommend waiting a few weeks with big WordPress changes to see what issues others face and wait for solutions to be found first.

But WordPress and WooCommerce have just seen some fairly big updates, so let’s check out what’s new in each version!

WordPress 5.4 – Adderley

Major WordPress versions always have a name and this one is Adderley, named after Nat Adderley – an American jazz trumpeter.

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Since version 5.0, WordPress has been developing their built-in visual editor, known as Gutenberg. For most WordPress developers, it’s awful and we avoid it like the plague. However, for the layperson, it’s an easy way to build cool modules in your website out the box.

WordPress 5.4 adds more features that can easily be added, such as buttons, social icons and gradients (since they’re still quite trendy). To find out more about all the new features that can be seen in WordPress 5.4, check out WordPress’ official release about it.

WooCommerce 4.0

WooCommerce is WordPress’ e-commerce plugin and it’s just had a major update in version 4.0. Your website needs to be running PHP 7.2 (it should be anyway!) for it to be stable enough to power this version of WooCommerce, so let us know if you need any help updating your PHP version.

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This major upgrade sees features that are largely aimed at the user rather than the developer. These features include:

  • A new dashboard with more analytics about the store/purchases etc.
  • Improved notifications
  • A better onboarding experience, so you can customise your shop more appropriately right from the get-go.
  • An improved order editor screen

It also includes a major upgrade to the Action Scheduler, which is a technology that runs in the background and is essential to WooCommerce, but irrelevant to most users!

Check out the official announcement for more details.

Again, if you need a hand updating your WooCommerce store as you’re worried possibly breaking your ecommerce website, then please get in touch or check out our WordPress maintenance packages.