Comparison of WordPress 6.0 vs 6.1 queries
WordPress 6.1, the third major update of the year, was announced for 1 November, but has been delayed a bit and won't start rolling out until 00:30 CET on 2 November.
Version 6.1, whose name will traditionally not be known until its release, is this year's last big update and I've been looking forward to it ever since I heard about the performance improvements.
Almost everything is already known, but I've yet to play with it. There are many notes, including the extensive official documentation, where you can go through all the new stuff that's coming and also what was going to come and has fallen by the wayside, such as the ability to convert JPEG images to WebP, which was planned for this version but has finally been excluded as some users warned that it made excessive use of resources during image loading.
More blocks, more settings
Yes, finally a Gutenberg table of contents block, another step towards getting rid of those cumbersome plugins with bulky collections of blocks or dedicated plugins. Until now I was adding the table of contents with a temporary solution without a plugin while waiting to replace them with the native ones since the first rumours of their creation.
And for this version they've gone all out with a lot of improvements in the core and in the Gutenberg editor. Eleven versions of the block editor will be merged with the WordPress core, which gives for many new blocks with their corresponding adjustments.
From new templates including a custom template for posts and pages, to various settings and new blocks to edit more parts of the page and more layout tools in each of the blocks to allow more customisations without having to use CSS
Performance boost
But where most buzz has been built, at least among WPO aficionados and professionals, is around its significant performance improvements.
There are four main improvements, the most anticipated of which is the caching of queries in WP_Query.
In addition, fewer database queries will be made in REST API requests, the caching API is improved and also database performance is improved as identifiers such as field names are now escaped with the %i placeholder. This will also, they say, help prevent SQL injection attacks.
Measurements
Jonathan Harris, the developer who has worked on implementing many of these and previous changes to the caching API has published a table of performance measurements on releases (beta and RC) with three Twenty family templates and the data is promising.
All that remains to be seen now is how Litespeed and their plugin will handle these improvements and when they will adjust to them, but in any case these new features will end up giving WordPress loading speed and performance a nice boost.
