WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza”

Meet “Esperanza”, the first WordPress release of 2021. “Esperanza” is named in honour of Esperanza Spalding, a modern musical prodigy. Her path as a musician is varied and inspiring – learn more about her and give her music a listen!

With this new version, WordPress brings you fresh colours. The editor helps you work in a few places you couldn’t before without getting into code or hiring a pro. The controls you use most are right where you need them. Layout changes that should be simple, are even simpler to make.

Now the new editor is easier to use

Font-size adjustment in more places: now, font-size controls are right where you need them in the List and Code blocks. No more trekking to another screen to make that single change!

Reusable blocks: several enhancements make reusable blocks more stable and easier to use. And now they save automatically with the post when you click the Update button.

Inserter drag-and-drop: drag blocks and block patterns from the inserter right into your post.

You can do more without writing custom code

Full-height alignment: have you ever wanted to make a block, like the Cover block, fill the whole window? Now you can.

Buttons block: now you can choose a vertical or a horizontal layout. And you can set the width of a button to a preset percentage.

Social Icons block: now you can change the size of the icons.

A simpler default colour palette

This new streamlined colour palette collapses all the colours that used to be in the WordPress source code down to seven core colours and a range of 56 shades that meet the WCAG 2.0 AA recommended contrast ratio against white or black.

Find the new palette in the default WordPress Dashboard colour scheme, and use it when you’re building themes, plugins, or any other components. For all the details, check out the Colour Palette developer note.

From HTTP to HTTPS in a single click

Starting now, switching a site from HTTP to HTTPS is a one-click move. WordPress will automatically update database URLs when you make the switch. No more hunting and guessing!

New Robots API

The new Robots API lets you include the filter directives in the robots meta tag, and the API includes the max-image-preview: large directive by default. That means search engines can show bigger image previews, which can boost your traffic (unless the site is marked not-public).

Lazy-load your iFrames

Now it’s simple to let iframes lazy-load. By default, WordPress will add a loading="lazy" attribute to iframe tags when both width and height are specified.

Ongoing cleanup after update to jQuery 3.5.1

For years, jQuery helped make things move on the screen in ways the basic tools couldn’t – but that keeps changing, and so does jQuery.

In 5.7, jQuery gets more focused and less intrusive, with fewer messages in the console.

Check the Field Guide for more!

Check out the latest version of the WordPress Field Guide. It highlights developer notes for each change you may want to be aware of. WordPress 5.7 Field Guide.

The Squad

The WordPress 5.7 release comes to you from a small and experienced release squad:  

• Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg (@matt)
• Triage Lead: Tonya Mork (@hellofromtonya)
• Release Coordinator: Ebonie Butler (@metalandcoffee)
• Core Tech Lead: Sergey Biryukov (@sergeybiryukov)
• Editor Tech Lead: Robert Anderson (@noisysocks)
• Design Lead: Tim Hengeveld (@hedgefield)
• Accessibility Lead: Sarah Ricker (@sarahricker)
• Documentation Lead: Jb Audras (@audrasjb)
• Test Lead: Monika Rao (@monikarao)

This release is the reflection of the hard work of 481 generous volunteer contributors. Collaboration occurred on nearly 250 tickets on Trac and over 950 pull requests on GitHub.

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