WordPress 5.0 is coming out December 6th, or, as I’m writing this, the day after tomorrow. This came as a surprise to us, as this release date has only been communicated to the community today. Given this short notice, we thought it would be wise to give you advice on what you should do.

There are several decisions you should make before updating to WordPress 5.0:

• What’s coming with WordPress 5.0?
• Is now the right time to update?
• Can your site work with Gutenberg?

What’s coming with WordPress 5.0?

The main (and huge) change in WordPress 5.0 is the editor. Instead of TinyMCE, we’re getting Gutenberg. Until now, Gutenberg used to be a plugin (as I’m writing this post, it still is). However, it is getting merged into WordPress 5.0.

Once you switch to WordPress 5.0, the editor that you’re using now will be retired and completely replaced by the new Gutenberg editor.

TinyMCE is going away in WordPress 5.0

Is now the right time to update?
This is holiday time for most of Europe and USA. postpone updating till January. Till January most of bugs will be resolved and lots of plugin and theme is not yet compatible with WP 5.0 will get compatible. it’s probably going to be more stable in January so we suggest to postpone till January.

We’ll be updating our production sites to WordPress 5.0 on January, assuming that from today and until January we’ll see only one release of WordPress and it will go out smoothly. This is the first time since our launch that we’re holding off updating our production sites to new WordPress versions.

Can your site work with Gutenberg?
Not all plugins are ready, and it’s important to know if the plugins you are using are ready before you hit update. If you only run Yoast SEO, you’re fine. If you run other plugins that integrate with the editing experience, make sure to check (either by testing or checking the plugins documentation) that they’re ready for, or at least “work with” Gutenberg. If they don’t, install and activate the Classic editor plugin before updating.

When you upgrade, please, as always: make a backup. If you have a staging environment, please use it. If you don’t have one, and your site is critical to your business, get one. This goes for every major software release though, not just this one.

Whats good in it?

Long term, we’re sure that WordPress and everyone using it will greatly benefit from this new editor.

However, for the next few weeks, and especially when dealing with existing sites, the drawbacks are bigger than the benefits.

Gutenberg is certainly a cool new editor, but it’s a completely new thing to WordPress. This means that a lot can break at the beginning.