After months of planning and preparation and testing, the latest release of WordPress is due for general release tomorrow, the 6th December.
The big question on everyone’s lips is, “Should I upgrade now, or wait a bit?”
Ok, maybe not everyone is asking that, but it’s certainly cropped up a number of times in our office discussions over recent weeks. Therefore, we thought we’d put together some Zonkey Advice to suggest a way forward.
Wait
Maybe offering the one word advice “wait” isn’t particularly helpful or technical, but that essentially sums it up quite nicely. If you read any of the WordPress forums or discussion groups you’ll realise fairly quickly that the general advice across the board is to hold fire, as whilst Gutenberg and WP5 are great, they’re just not quite ready yet for full deployment.
One aspect is whether WP5 itself is fully cooked, but one of the main issues is whether other plugin and theme developers have done enough with their software to make everything compatible. You could upgrade WordPress core and have no issues, but then you’ll find problems with editing your pages and with some of your functionality because other plugins haven’t quite caught up.
Ongoing Development
Although WordPress 5 launches, there’s already list of bugs and fixes that are being worked on, so it’s likely that another revision of 5 will be made available in the coming weeks. With any major software release, it’s almost expected that there will be problems, so why be the guinea pig and find them first. Our advice is it’s best to wait, probably until next year, before you upgrade.
How can Zonkey help?
If you’re a WordPress Maintenance customer, then we’ll be starting to look at updating your site in the coming weeks. You won’t need to do anything, we’ll take care of it for you. If, because of your theme or specific functionality, additional works needs to be done to make your site compatible, then we’ll be in touch to discuss this.
If you’re not yet on a maintenance package, now is the time to consider it. Get in contact with us to discuss options and we can give you tailored information about your site and the issues you may face to do with plugin compatibility etc.
If you have an old website where the theme or some of the plugins are no longer supported, and therefore won’t be compatible with WordPress 5, then we have some options for you for upgrade the theme on your site to meet the new standards.