What's New in WordPress 5.3 (New Blocks, New APIs, Improved Admin Interface)

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WordPress 5.3 “Kirk” was officially released on November 12, 2019 and is available for download.

What changed with WordPress 5.3?

First of all, a large number of versions of the Gutenberg plugin have been merged into core, from 5.4 to 6.6. This means that we will see a large number of features and improvements for both users and developers, as well as a significant performance boost .

But there’s a lot more to WordPress 5.3 than just Gutenberg. In fact, this release includes several improvements related to the Site Health Tool , a new default theme (Twenty Twenty) , improvements to the Admin UI, better support for PHP 7.4 , improved accessibility, and more.

That’s a lot of amazing stuff, right? So, let’s buckle up and dive deeper into WordPress 5.3.

What's New with the Block Editor?
Since its release , the Block Editor has been regularly improved thanks to the commitment of contributors around the world. However, new versions are not merged into core as soon as they are available.

With 5.3, thirteen versions of the Gutenberg plugin have been merged into the core in one fell swoop. So, if you haven’t been using the Gutenberg plugin until now, and haven’t been updating it regularly benin phone number data over time, you’ll find plenty of improvements and new features in the Block Editor with the release of WordPress 5.3.

Overall performance improvements have also been reported . The following benchmark compares the performance of a huge post (36,000 words/1,000 blocks) with different versions of the Gutenberg plugin.

You may not notice the difference in load time with regular posts, but the overall improvement in editor performance is pretty clear.

Version Charging Time KeyPress Event (Write)
Gutenberg 6.6.0 4.7s 38.96ms
Gutenberg 6.5.0 4.68s 42.96ms
WordPress 5.2 5.69s 57.65ms
It would be difficult to make a complete list of all additions, changes and bug fixes, so we selected those with the greatest impact on the user/developer experience and grouped them as follows: