“65+ accessibility fixes and enhancements focus on foundational aspects of the WordPress experience, from improving user interface components and keyboard navigation in the Editor, to an accessible heading on WordPress login screens and clearer labeling throughout.”
Performance Updates
The latest version of the WordPress core ships with faster pattern loading and better PHP 8+ support. Old code (deprecated) is removed to create a more lightweight theme, plus a new auto size component that improves lazy-loading images.
That last improvement to lazy loading should help improve core web vitals scores because the Auto Sizes feature helps the browser select the right image size from the CSS and use that to build the web page, rather than using the image size itself. CSS is usually downloaded before images, so having to depend on image size is redundant and slower. Chrome shipped with this ability last year, December 2023.
Engineering lead at Google Chrome Addy Osmani tweeted about it last year:
“Chrome is shipping <img sizes=”auto”> support for lazy-loaded images with srcset, this allows the browser to use the layout width of the image in order to select the source url from the srcset.
For lazy-loaded images, CSS is often available before the image load begins. The browser can take the actual width of the image from CSS and use that as if it was the image’s sizes.”
The official WordPress announcement for the auto sizes for lazy loading explains:
WordPress documentation for the auto sizes feature explains:
“WordPress 6.7 adds sizes=”auto” for lazy-loaded images. This feature, which was recently added to the HTML specification, allows the browser to use the rendered layout width of the image when selecting a source from the srcset list, since lazy loaded images don’t load until after the layout is known.”
Is It Safe To Download WordPress 6.7?
Most developers discussing the latest version of WordPress in the private Dynamic WordPress Facebook group report that updating to the latest version is easy and trouble-free.
But some developers reported maintenance mode errors that were easily resolved by deleting the .maintenance file (maintenance mode file. The .maintenance mode error doesn’t happen because there’s something wrong with the update, it’s usually because there’s something going on with the upstream server that’s providing the update. The WordPress.org 6.7 documentation page was temporarily down so maybe the WordPress servers were experiencing too much traffic.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero