A Look at WordPress 6.4

WordPress 6.4 was released on Tuesday, November 7, 2023 with a number of new features, most notably 100 performance improvements. As in recent releases, we are continuing to see the trend of more performant WordPress sites that make building with the new block editor easier than ever. 

In this blog post, we look at some of these new features that can make building with WordPress easier than ever while bringing better performance and accessibility. 

Performance Improvements

Two years ago, the WordPress Performance Team was formed with the purpose of  improving overall performance for WordPress site owners. In an announcement post from the WordPress core team, we see that WordPress 6.4 contains over 100 performance improvements. 

These improvements include better template loading performance for themes and  usage of the new script loading strategies “defer” and “async” in core, blocks, and themes. There are also new functions to optimize the use of autoloaded options. 

WordPress 6.4 also changed how scripts with the “defer” attribute are loaded. The defer attribute tells the browser not to execute a script until the user’s browser has loaded the entire web page. Scripts with the defer attribute that were in the footer area of a WordPress site have now been moved to the HTML head section.

For WordPress site owners, this means better page speed performance. For site visitors, this means a better visiting experience on sites using WordPress 6.4. 

Accessibility Improvements

At Kadence, website accessibility is incredibly important to us. We believe that making the web accessible means a better experience for everyone. As such, we’ve been excited to see the improvements to accessibility in WordPress 6.4. These updates focus on enhancing the user interface (UI) in the WordPress administrative panel. 

While the improvements of better button placements, improved context for “Add New” admin menu items might seem small, they provide greater context for administrative actions for users with accessibility needs, as well as those who are new to WordPress who may require greater clarity in getting comfortable with a new CMS editing experience. 

Categorizing Block Patterns

Block patterns are a collection of one or more blocks that can be created, saved and reused across all of your WordPress site, whether on posts or pages. Much like the Kadence Design Library, these block patterns are collections of blocks that can be reused throughout a WordPress site. 

The addition of categorization allows site owners to add their own categories of block patterns, keeping track of a growing collection of patterns easier.

List View Improvements 

Kadence users will recognize this feature, as it’s something we’ve added to Kadence Blocks recently. List View is one of the easiest ways to easily see the layout of your pages. However, sometimes the generic descriptions of blocks can make things confusing. WordPress 6.4 follows a feature added by Kadence in allowing site editors to rename blocks on a page within the List View so that finding that one specific block requiring an edit is now much easier. 

As well, users can now see image previews for core gallery and image blocks in List View. This way, you know exactly which image block is which image, so diving into an edit makes things much easier. 

Block Hooks

WordPress 6.4 introduces a new feature called Block Hooks. This is an an extensibility mechanism for Block Themes that used to be called “Auto-inserting blocks.” Block Hooks enable plugins to interact automatically with the Gutenberg editor. Blocks can now be placed automatically in a specific position when another block is added to content. 

So basically, this allows a FSE theme developer to have a cart block show in the default theme header if WooCommerce is active (and providing the cart block). It’s not currently useful for end users since it’s built to only work with theme-defined patterns and templates and not user-defined patterns and templates.

Image Lightboxes 

It’s incredibly easy to now toggle on previewing images in a lightbox right in the Core Image Block settings. When you want to give your site visitors the capability to view a larger version of an image quickly, this is a great new feature that reduces the need for other plugins for this effect. Easy to toggle on and off, you can choose to use this when desired, or leave it off allowing a user to click on an image linked to another page. 

Hint: make sure you remove the link on an image before you toggle this on or the toggle will be deactivated. 

Twenty TwentyFour Theme

Every year, WordPress releases a new default theme that uses some new core features. Twenty TwentyFour is this year’s release, and it has some interesting features. A full block theme, Twenty TwentyFour gives us a look at where WordPress is going with site editing. Kadence Blocks is an excellent adjunct to Twenty TwentyFour as we all begin exploring the capabilities of block themes. 

Orientation Text

With the release of WordPress 6.4 you’ll find some fun new creative tools such as the ability to vertically orient your text. This new typography tool allows you to create engaging designs that are outside-the-box.

Conclusion

Have you started looking at WordPress 6.4 yet? What features are you seeing that excite you about the future? Did your site see performance improvements? Leave a comment below and let us know your experience.