The WordPress Content Management System undergoes major changes each year. Many of these changes are aimed at helping users create websites with point-and-click options and intuitive user interfaces. WordPress is an excellent choice for business owners and aspiring web designers who don’t have any knowledge of web-based programming languages like JavaScript. Read on to find out which major changes and new features you can expect to hit the WordPress platform in 2019.
WordPress Changes for 2019
Many WordPress experts are expecting to see the release of WordPress 5.0 in early 2019. This will be a major improvement on the current CMS and will likely contain major changes to the admin dashboard. WordPress 5.0 is expected to be more user-friendly for those who have never built a website and more mobile-first in design with tools available for Apple and Android phones that will allow you to modify and create websites in as much detail as you can currently do through a desktop setting.
WordPress 5.0 is going to incorporate the Gutenberg editor that will slowly be released throughout the coming year. This editor will allow you to make changes to your existing articles and posts and create new posts using a drag-and-drop interface. This is an improvement in terms of usability for users who don’t feel comfortable editing the occasional HTML or CSS.
Advanced Changes for WordPress
For users who prefer a more advanced and technical interface, the CLI, or Command Line Interface, for WordPress is expected to see upgrades and wider-spread use in 2019. This administrator interface will be familiar to anyone who uses Shell or command-line level methods in Windows, Linux, or a variety of website software packages. This will appeal to many users who don’t want to rely on the graphical Gutenberg interface for sensitive data or format changes and updates to their website.
WordPress users will notice an increasing reliance on JavaScript throughout 2019. The powerful web language is becoming more and more dominant in the plugin, theme, and interface areas of many WordPress websites today and the trend is expected to continue well through 2019 and beyond. Browsers are able to handle JavaScript well and it makes sense that the efficient language will be used more throughout the WordPress CMS. This is also great news for WordPress hosting users, as scripts like JavaScript are processed on the browser-side of a website’s connection, requiring less resources from your web server.
WordPress Security Updates for 2019
WordPress will, without a doubt, implement a number of security upgrades and patches throughout the 2019 calendar year. Users are reporting vulnerabilities to the WordPress development team every week as they are discovered, and these vulnerabilities get addresses in each future release. By mid-2019 you can expect many potential security issues that could affect your WordPress hosting to be resolved and accounted for by the new CMS version releases.
Many security issues in WordPress that have been found this year relate to the PHP and XSS loopholes that developers overlooked or failed to anticipate. These loopholes are present in virtually every technology and aren’t unique to the WordPress platform, but given the platform’s popularity, they tend to affect millions of users by the time they are made known to the public.
New WordPress Plugins for 2019
Most of the major plugins that are available for WordPress in 2018 will be upgraded for 2019. This is due, in large part, to the advancement of machine learning and new coding libraries that increase plugin efficiency and utility. Marketing and cross-platform plugins may see some of the biggest changes and machine learning allows marketing software to become better at collecting and analyzing traffic from your users and others who browse the web for content similar to what your website is sharing.
The Akismet Plugin for WordPress is one of the most popular web plugins in the world and continuously grows in performance metrics and efficiency thanks to machine learning. As this plugin becomes better at detecting spam and unwanted comments you will spend less time manually filtering out comments on your WordPress posts. This will open your schedule for more design and marketing work and generally improve the quality of the increasingly WordPress-backed web.
WordPress is a dynamic and growing CMS and has served as a stable platform for tens to hundreds of millions of websites for the past few years. A decrease in WordPress use during 2019 is highly unlikely, as the CMS proves itself more useful with each new release and version update. The platform will continue to become more secure and user-friendly for administrators who don’t know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Check out the WordPress plugins repository to discover changes coming to plugins for 2019 and learn how technological advancements like machine learning are improving anti-spam measures and other plugins for the coming year.
