WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 Released with Fixes for 71 Issues and Important Performance Improvements for Block Themes – WP Tavern
WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 was launched at the moment and is now obtainable for testing, one week after Beta 1. Testers can simply obtain the latest beta zip file or set up the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and set it to the “Bleeding edge” channel and the “Beta/RC Solely” stream.
Beta 2 consists of fixes for ~71 points since final week’s launch, together with the newest Gutenberg plugin 15.1 launch, which was not included in Beta 1. Testers can try the listing of probably the most recent commits to 6.2 on GitHub and recent commits on Trac.
In the newest Efficiency Group assembly, WordPress core committer Felix Arntz highlighted an important fix for how lazy loading is handled in block themes. WordPress 5.9 fixed a performance regression the place WordPress’ default of lazy loading all pictures was inflicting slower efficiency on the Largest Contentful Paint metric (LCP) metric. This resulted in 30% faster page loads in some cases.
4 months in the past, it was found that block themes have been having a difficulty with lazy loading the place the earlier repair was not working as anticipated.
“With the introduction of block themes, that logic was not functioning appropriately, leading to all featured pictures to be lazy-loaded, no matter whether or not it was the LCP picture or not,” Arntz mentioned within the commit message.
“Along with an replace to the core/post-featured-image block included in [55079], this changeset fixes the logic to appropriately deal with featured pictures in block themes as effectively.
“Moreover, together with an replace to the core/template-part block from [55246], this changeset consists of an enhancement which makes use of the advantages of block template elements to keep away from lazy-loading pictures within the header block template half, making the lazy-loading heuristics much more correct for websites utilizing a block theme.”
The fix, which is included within the 6.2 Beta 2 launch, introduces enhanced logic to find out the LCP picture in block themes and keep away from lazy-loading it.
Supplied every part stays on monitor, the official launch is now simply six weeks away, focused for March 28, 2023.
