WordPress 5.0 aka Gutenberg is now scheduled to be released on Thursday, December 6th 2018. That’s right, Gutenberg is almost here. Are you ready for this major update to the most popular blogging and website creation tool used by over 32% of modern websites online?
Over the past few months, I uploaded various videos to my YouTube Channel where I focus on WordPress for Coders & Non-Coders. The dedicated Gutenberg Playlist provides you with step by step walk through’s on how to use the new editor. I definitely recommend checking them out and making sure your website is ready for this update.
What is Gutenberg?
Gutenberg is the new way to create content on your WordPress powered website & blog. Over the past few years we’ve used the TinyMCE editor which gave us an easy way to make sure our posts and pages were formatted properly. It has served us well but times are changing and there’s always ways to make our content creation even easier.
Will Your Themes and Plugins Work With Gutenberg?
Testing your website is the best way to ensure that your website will continue to work and creating content will be improved and not negatively impacted by the update. In general, the vast majority of themes and plugins that are actively maintained should work with the new update. That being said, themes and plugins that aren’t actively worked on might face some issues.
I recommend testing your website on a local development environment. The reason for this is to make sure that you don’t run into any issues on your production website. You can get a complete clone of your live website to test out by using the Duplicator Plugin and setting up a local development environment which are really easy to do once you see the steps. Below are two videos you should check out.
How To Use the Duplicator Plugin to Clone Your WordPress Website
Following the steps in the video above will ensure you get an exact clone of your live website. Note: this is also a great way to backup your WordPress powered website.
How To Use MAMP or Local By Flywheel for WordPress
Setting up a local web server is the best way to test changes and updates to the WordPress Core, themes and plugins, in a safe environment while not running into issues on your production website.
MAMP is very easy to use and works on both MacOS and Windows based computers.
Local By Flywheel is a great alternative to MAMP and provides some extra features that are helpful for developers and content creators. Here’s the video for setting up Local By Flywheel.
Backup Your WordPress Website
Taking a backup before you update your WordPress Website is important to do. You should take a backup of your files and folders along with your database. There are various ways to get this done and I’ve created a few videos that show you how to backup WordPress either by using a plugin or by using Filezilla and PHPMyAdmin.
How To Manually Backup WordPress without a Plugin
While there are a bunch of great plugins to make this process easier, sometimes it makes sense to minimize plugin usage and go the manual approach. Checkout the video above.
Should You Update to WordPress 5.0?
What if you’re not ready to update just yet. What if your website is highly dependent on the holiday shopping season and you’re just not prepared to test or gamble on updating to the latest version with the Gutenberg editor? Don’t worry, updating can be delayed until you’re ready.
The team at Yoast even stated it might be best to hold off on updating until January which will give you time to get through the holiday shopping season, watch the WordPress News to see if any critical bugs exist. This will also give the developers of WordPress Core, themes and plugins, time to code any changes to ensure maximum compatibility.
The Classic Editor Plugin
Another option is to update to the latest version of WordPress but also install the Classic Editor Plugin which will disable Gutenberg and give you the content creation experience you’ve been using for the past few years.
This is an option I recommend for those who want to have the latest version of WordPress, but haven’t had the time to really test your site to ensure things work well.
Disable Gutenberg Plugin
Jeff Starr is a well known WordPress developer who has created a lot of great plugins which can be found on the WordPress repository. The Disable Gutenberg Plugin is one of his many contributions. This is an alternative solution to the plugin mentioned above.
Is WordPress 5.0 aka Gutenberg Ready for Prime Time?
The team at WordPress has been working around the clock making sure they can eliminate any critical bugs. Gutenberg has been tested on over 1.3 million websites which is a good amount of sites that have helped to make sure Gutenberg is ready for public release.
That being said, bugs will likely be found and patched accordingly.
The Takeaway
WordPress 5.0 aka Gutenberg is slated for release on December 6th, 2018. If you’ve been following this blog and my YouTube Channel, then you should be prepared in what to do. If you haven’t tested your site yet, now’s the time to do so. Follow the videos I linked too up above.
So what are you waiting for? Backup your website now. Make sure to backup your files and folders along with your database.