WordPress 5.3 Major Release is Now Available!

The final major WordPress release of 2019 is now available! WordPress 5.3 aims to polish current interactions and make the UIs more user-friendly. If you haven’t tried 5.3 yet, now is the time! 

This release comes with a huge number of features and enhancements for both users and developers, as well as an important boost in performance. WordPress 5.3 expands and refines the Block Editor introduced in WordPress 5.0 with new blocks, more intuitive interactions, and improved accessibility. New features in the editor increase design freedoms, provide additional layout options and style variations to allow designers to complete control over the look of a site.

This release also introduces the Twenty Twenty theme giving the user more design flexibility and integration with the Block Editor.

In addition, WordPress 5.3 allows developers to work with dates and timezones in a more reliable way and prepares the software to work with PHP 7.4, improved accessibility and much more. 

Let’s discuss the improvements the release has come with, you expect:

Site Health

WordPress introduced the Site Health feature With the 5.2 version. This feature examines different aspects of your WordPress install and server setup encouraging admins to upgrade PHP from the outdated PHP versions.

WordPress 5.3 expands on the Site Health feature and adds additional components.

Email Verification

The 5.3 release introduces admin email verifications to ensure the main admin contact email address is valid, which affects the earlier version 5.2. WordPress 5.2 introduced recovery mode which is available through an email the admin will receive during an error in the WordPress website. 

PHP 7.4 Compatibility

WordPress 5.3 brings compatibility for PHP 7.4. We would suggest confirming that your plugins can run PHP 7.4 before upgrading your install.

Twenty Twenty Theme

The big focus of version 5.3 is Twenty Twenty Theme which is designed with flexibility at its core.

• As befits a theme called Twenty Twenty, clarity and readability is also a big focus. To that end, the theme will include the typeface Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson. The tall x-height of Inter makes it highly legible in the smallest of font sizes, and provides a strong personality when used in big headings. 

• Inter comes in a Variable Font version, a first for default themes, which contains all weights and styles of Inter in just two font files. In modern browsers, this will help keep the number of requests and the page size down. Older browsers will fall back to loading each weight as a separate file. Running text will be set in a stack of serif system fonts to keep load times short and data caps distant.

Source: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2019/09/06/introducing-twenty-twenty/

WordPress 5.3 adds even more robust tools for creating amazing designs:

• The new Group block lets you easily divide your page into colorful sections.

• The Columns block now supports fixed column widths.

• The new predefined layouts make it a cinch to arrange content into advanced designs.

• Heading blocks now offer controls for text and background color.

• Additional style options allow you to set your preferred style for any block that supports this feature.

You can download WordPress 5.2.4 or visit Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now. Sites that support automatic background updates have already started to update automatically.

Log in to cPanel ⇒ go to the SOFTACULOUS APPS INSTALLER section of the cPanel home screen ⇒ click any of the options under Categories. In the icon list at the top right, ⇒ click the icon (All Installations icon) ⇒ Locate the application that you want to update ⇒ and click the icon (Upgrade icon).

The technology also assists with debugging common configuration issues and provides a means for users to access a site while it is experiencing technical difficulties.