WordPress 5.7 What’s New? New Features and Changes

Last updated: May 8, 2022

WordPress 5.7 was released on March 9, 2021. Now you can update to WordPress 5.7, and here's what's changing in WordPress 5.7, as well as what's new and changed.

WordPress 5.7 Release Date

WordPress 5.7 was released on March 9, 2021.

The development cycle for WordPress 5.7 was scheduled as follows.

The release status of other versions can be found in the following article.

WordPress 5.7 Code Name

The WordPress code name is named after a jazz musician.

WordPress 5.7 is codenamed Esperanza, after the American jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding.

Esperanza Spalding – YouTube

Server requirements for WordPress 5.7

The following requirements apply to run WordPress 5.7.

• PHP 7.4 or greater
• MySQL 5.6 or MariaDB 10.1 or greater
• Apache or Nginx

How to get WordPress 5.7

WordPress 5.7 available on the download page.

Please refer to the article below on how to download WordPress.

How to try WordPress 5.7 beta?

There are two ways to try out the beta version of WordPress.

• Install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin
• Download the Zip file

The beta version may be subject to updates to the database structure during development. It is not always possible to downgrade.

Do not use it on the site you are running. Please prepare a local environment.

How to install the WordPress Beta Tester and update to the beta version is described in the following article.

How to update WordPress 5.7

To update to WordPress 5.7, click the Update Now button on the Update page of your dashboard.

Be sure to back up your files and database before a major update.

You will be in maintenance mode during the update.

New features and changes in WordPress 5.7

WordPress 5.7 has the following new features and changes.

Block Editor

Drag and Drop

Blocks and Block Patterns can now be inserted by drag and drop.

Switch full height

Blocks, such as Cover Blocks, can now be displayed in the entire window.

Button Blocks

It is now possible to vertically align the content within a button.

You can also set the width of the button as a percentage.

Social Icons Blocks

The size of the icons in the social icon block can now be changed.

Font size can now be changed in more blocks

Font size can now be changed within a block, such as in List blocks.

Reusable blocks are more user-friendly

When you click the “Update” button, the reuse block is now automatically saved at the time of submission.

From Options to Preferences

The name has been changed from “Options” to “Preferences”. You can now set the General/Appearance/Blocks/Panels from Preferences.

Lazy loading of iframe

iframe are used when inserting videos from YouTube, etc. iframe are lazy loading, which speeds up the initial display of the page.

In WordPress 5.7, “loading=”lazy”” is automatically added to the iframe tag. However, the width and height must be specified in the iframe tag.

The following article explains how to disable lazy loading of iframe.

Migrate from HTTP to HTTPS with a single click

You can switch your site from HTTP to HTTPS with one click. URLs in the database will also be updated automatically.

Standardized Color Palette

In WordPress 5.7, the color palette used in the admin panel has been consolidated into 12 colors (blue/green/red/yellow), 13 colors (gray), black, and white.

New Robots API

A function called wp_robots will be introduced to allow programmatic control of the robots meta tag.

The “max-image-preview:large” tag is now inserted by default. When thumbnails are displayed in search results, large images will be displayed.

<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:large">

If you want to disable max-image-preview, use the following filter.

remove_filter( 'wp_robots', 'wp_robots_max_image_preview_large' );

Remove jQuery Migrate

WordPress 5.7 will remove “jQuery Migrate”. fix the code that was deprecated/removed in jQuery 3.5.1.

The jQuery upgrade from WordPress 5.5 to 5.7 is explained in the following article.

Other versions of WordPress 5.7

Updates for other versions of WordPress 5.7 are available here.

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