WordPress 6.1 was released a few hours back, and it is the last major release of 2022.

This new release contains significant updates to the full site editing and the block editor experience.

In this article, we’ll show you what’s new in WordPress 6.1, and which features you should try after updating your websites.

Note: WordPress 6.1 is a major release, and unless you are on a managed WordPress hosting service, you’ll have to manually initiate the update. Here’s how to safely update WordPress.

Important: Don’t forget to create a complete WordPress backup before updating.

That being said, here’s all that’s new in WordPress 6.1.

Twenty Twenty-Three – New Default Theme

WordPress 6.1 ships with a brand new default theme called Twenty Twenty-Three.

Out of the box, this theme features a minimalist design that looks like a blank canvas and encourages you to bring your own style to the theme.

It comes packed with 10 style variations that users can choose from inside the Site Editor. All of these styles are fully customizable using the site editor.

Twenty Twenty-Three also ships with four fonts that are used by different style variations. You can also use these fonts when writing posts or pages.

Twenty Twenty-Three can be a perfect starter theme for users who want to make a website using the block editor with their own styles and layouts.

Block Editor Changes in WordPress 6.1

The block editor is where users write content, create pages, and edit their themes.

Each WordPress release comes with major improvements, new features, and enhancements to the block editor.

Following are a few most noticeable changes in the block editor.

List and Quote Blocks Now Have Inner Blocks

One of the problems with bulleted lists was that if you wanted to move a list item up and down you had to manually delete and edit all the list items.

WordPress 6.1 brings inner blocks for Quote and List blocks. Basically, each list item is its own block and you can move list items up and down.

The Quote block is now also divided into inner blocks.

Now you can style quote and cite blocks differently.

Featured Image in Cover Block

With WordPress 6.1, you can now select the featured image to be used for a cover block. After that, you can just set the featured image and it will start appearing inside the cover.

Many beginners often confuse cover block and featured images. Hopefully, this will now allow them to just use cover block to display featured image for an article.

Note: Depending on your theme, you may see the featuerd image appear twice. First, at the location where your theme displays the featured image and then as the cover block.

New & Improved Borders

WordPress 6.1 brings a lot of options to the design tools available for blocks. One of them is the more powerful border tool that is now available for several blocks.

You can use set top, right, bottom, left borders separately, and give them different colors and sizes.

Previously users were able to only select the border radius for the image block.

Now with WordPress 6.1, you can set border color and size as well.

More Padding and Margin Options

WordPress 6.1 brings ‘Dimensions’ tool to more blocks allowing users to set padding and margins.

Users will also be able to visualize their changes with neat visual hints.

You can also set margins for Spacer and Separator blocks, which allows you to create more spacious content layouts.

New and Improved Navigation Blocks

WordPress 6.1 now allows you to easily change background and text color for sub-menus.

The Navigation now also allows you to easily choose a menu from the block toolbar or the sidebar panel.

Editor Design Refinements in WordPress 6.1

WordPress 6.1 ships with some noticable refinements to Editor design. These changes clean up the interface and aim to improve user experience.

Status & Visibility Panel Renamed to Summary

The Status & visibility panel is renamed to Summary. Template and Permalink panels are now removed and merged into the Summary panel.

You can click on the URL field to change the Permalink or Template name to change template.

Here is how it looked in WordPress 6.0 vs WordPress 6.1.

Time to Read in the Information Panel

The information panel now includes ‘Time to read’ information as well.

Site Icon Replaces the WordPress Logo

If you have set the site icon for your website, then it will be used as the View Posts button in the top left corner of the screen.

New Preferences Options

The Preferences section for the block editor now includes two new options.

First, there is ‘Always open list view’ which shows the list sidebar by default for all articles.

Then, there is ‘Show button text labels’ which replaces icons in toolbars with text labels.

Create More Templates in Site Editor

If you have used child themes with classic WordPress themes, then you may be familiar with the template heirarchy.

With WordPress 6.1, users are now able to do the same using the block editor and without writing code.

You can use the following templates regardless of which block theme you are using.

Single pageSingle postIndivdual term in a taxonomyIndividual categoryCustom template (can be used for any post or page)

You can go to the Appearance » Editor page and then select templates from the left sidebar. After that, click on the Add New button to see the available options.

Choosing a template that can be applied to an individual item, will see bring up a popup.

From here, you can choose the item where you want the new template to be used.

For instance, if you choose the Category template, then you’ll see a popup.

Now you can select if you want to apply your new template for all categories or a specific category.

Quickly Search and Use Template Parts

The site editor in WordPress 6.1 now makes it easier to discover and use template parts.

For instance, if your theme had multiple template parts that can be used in the header, then you can simply click on the template part options and select Replace.

This will bring up a modal popup where you can look for available template parts that you can use.

Quickly Clear Customizations in Site Editor

WordPress 6.1 now allows you to quickly clear customizations when working in Site Editor.

Under the Hood Changes in WordPress 6.1

WordPress 6.1 comes with several important changes for developers. Following are a few of these changes.

Classic themes can now use template parts (Details)Fluid typography allows theme developers to dynamically adjust font sizes. (Details)Post types can now have their own starter patterns (Details).Filters to hook into theme.json data (Details)Simplified data access with React hooks in WordPress 6.1 (Details) New is_login() function to for determining if a page is the login screen. (Details)

We hope this article helped you discover what’s new in WordPress 6.0 and which new features to try out. We are particularly excited about all the changes to the block editor.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post What’s New in WordPress 6.1 (Features and Screenshots) first appeared on WPBeginner.

Are you trying to fix the WordPress SEO crawl budget problem?

SEO crawl budget is the number of times search engines will crawl pages on your website. A lower crawl budget can delay your pages from getting indexed in a timely manner. This can hurt your SEO rankings and lower your overall traffic.

In this article, we’ll explain the WordPress SEO crawl budget problem and how to fix it quickly.

Because this is a huge topic, we have broken it down into easy-to-understand sections. Here are the different items we’ll cover in this article:

How Does Search Crawling work?

Search engines like Google, use sophisticated bots (computer programs) to visit websites across the internet.

These bots look for changes on a website and compare them to the main search index.

If they discover new content, then they add it to the search index. If they find content that is already in the index but has changed, then they update the index with fresh content.

They follow links on a page and then do the same for those pages as well.

The way bots move from one link to other links on a page is similar to how real spiders crawl along their webs.

That’s why the term crawling is used to describe this activity, and you may sometimes see the bots referred to as search engine spiders.

For better SEO, you need to make sure that search engines can crawl your website easily.

What is SEO Crawl Budget?

SEO crawl budget is the number of times search engines like Google will crawl pages on your website.

Google bots crawl billions of pages each day. They try to calculate how many pages they will crawl on each website domain to efficiently use resources.

This number is automatically determined by the crawling algorithms based on multiple factors.

It fluctuates daily, which means there is no fixed number for how many pages the Google bot will crawl on your WordPress website.

Generally, larger websites with more content have a higher crawl budget, and smaller websites have a lower budget.

Other factors also influence the crawl budget, like the popularity of a URL, freshness, update frequency, and more.

However, due to several reasons, you may be losing your crawl budget on unwanted pages.

For instance, if your website isn’t properly optimized, then search engines will spend your crawl budget on less significant parts of your website than important content.

What Causes WordPress SEO Crawl Budget Issues

The way WordPress generates URLs and duplicate content can cause crawl budget issues.

For instance, WordPress automatically generates RSS feeds for different areas of your website.

There are RSS feeds for the main blog, categories and tags, comments on each individual post and page, and even custom post types have separate RSS feed URLs.

Links to these RSS feeds are added to the HTML source code of your website which makes them discoverable by search engines.

Now, search engines are smart enough to recognize duplicate content and ignore it. However, they would still crawl them and spend your SEO crawl budget.

Apart from that, search engines would crawl less important items a lot more than needed. This includes your archives, taxonomies, authors, PDF files, and more.

WordPress plugins or other third-party tools can also add query parameters to your WordPress URLs.

Google’s spiders may consider these query parameters to be a different page and crawl them.

For instance, UTM parameters are used for Google Analytics tracking and a page with or without these query parameters would still look the same.

Example: https://yourdomain.com/landingpage/?utm_source=newsletter

This wastes your SEO crawl budget on less important items and becomes an issue.

How to Calculate Your SEO Crawl Budget

The SEO crawl budget is not a set number of pages.

It fluctuates a lot, and there is no reliable way of predicting how many pages Google will crawl on your website on any given day.

However, you can get a pretty decent idea based on recent crawl activity to see how Google crawls your website.

If you haven’t done so, you first need to add your website to Google Search Console. It is a free tool provided by Google to help website owners find out how their website is doing in Google Search.

Simply go to your Search Console dashboard. Switch to the ‘Settings’ menu from the left column and then click on ‘Open Report’ next to ‘Crawl stats.’

The Crawl stats report will show an overview of crawl requests on your website during the last few weeks.

You can hover your mouse over the chart to see how many pages were requested each day.

This gives you an idea of what the average crawl rate was on your site during this period of time.

Below that, you can see a breakdown of crawl activity by response code, file types, purpose, and Google bot type.

From here, you can see how much the crawl budget is spent on errors, syndication (RSS feeds), JavaScript, CSS, Images, and more.

This gives you a snapshot of items that you can optimize to utilize the SEO crawl budget more efficiently.

For example, if you have a lot of 404 errors being crawled, then you can use a redirection plugin to ensure those crawlers land on useful content.

(Later in the article, we show you how to redirect crawl errors step-by-step.)

Why You Should Care About SEO Crawl Budget

Search engines need to crawl your website efficiently, so they can properly index your content on time.

However, if your SEO crawl budget is being wasted, then your important and newer content may not get crawled on time.

It may even take weeks for the search engines to notice updates to your older articles or discover your new content.

You will miss out on getting traffic from search engines, your SEO rankings may not improve, and you will definitely lose money on sales or ad revenue.

How to Easily Optimize SEO Crawl Budget in WordPress

The easiest and safest way to optimize your SEO crawl budget in WordPress is by using All in One SEO for WordPress.

It is the best WordPress SEO plugin that comes with an SEO crawl optimization tool built-in.

First, you need to install and activate the All in One SEO for WordPress plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: There is also a free version of All in One SEO which also includes a crawl clean-up feature. We recommend using the PRO plan of the paid plugin because it will also give you access to the Redirection manager tool to fix 404 errors on your website.

Upon activation, the plugin will show you a setup wizard. Simply follow the on-screen instructions to set up the plugin.

After that, you can go to All in One SEO » Search Appearance page.

Then, just switch to the Advanced tab.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and there you’ll see the ‘Crawl Cleanup’ option.

Click the toggle to enable the ‘Crawl Cleanup’ feature.

The first option you will see in the crawl cleanup is to remove the query arguments.

Below that, you can provide a list of query arguments that you want to allow. Advanced users can use Regex regular expressions here.

Next, you’ll see options for WordPress RSS feeds. All in One SEO will show you all different kinds of RSS feeds generated by WordPress, and you can disable the less important RSS feeds.

For instance, if you have a single-author blog, then you can Disable the Author Feeds.

Once you have disabled all the unwanted RSS feeds, don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

How to Set Up Redirects for Error Pages

All in One SEO will automatically set up redirects for feeds you have disabled. For instance, a tag RSS feed will now redirect users to the tag archive page.

Next, you need to switch to your Google Search Console dashboard and open the crawl stats report.

From here, you can see the pages that resulted in errors.

Now depending on the status code, you can set up redirects for those pages.

For instance, you can redirect 404 errors to a similar page. You can check other pages with errors and set up redirects for them as well.

All in One SEO makes it very easy to set up redirects on your WordPress website. Simply go to All in One SEO » Redirects page and add the old URL under the ‘Source URL’ and new URL under the ‘Target URL’ field.

Click on the ‘Add Redirect’ button to save your settings. Then, you can just repeat the process to set up more redirects as needed. For more details and alternate methods, see our guide on how to set up redirects in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn about the WordPress SEO crawl budget problem and how to fix it. You may also want to see these expert tips on using Google Search Console to grow traffic or see practical examples of how to improve organic click-through rate in WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post The WordPress SEO Crawl Budget Problem and How to Fix It first appeared on WPBeginner.

Recently, one of our users asked us how they can stop search engines from crawling and indexing their WordPress site.

There are several scenarios when you would want to stop search engines from crawling your website and listing it in search results.

In this article, we will show you how to stop search engines from crawling a WordPress site.

Why Stop Search Engines From Crawling a WordPress Site?

For most WordPress websites, search engines are the biggest source of traffic. You may ask, why would anyone want to block search engines?

Here are some situations when you won’t want search engines to index your website:

When starting out, you may not know how to create a local development environment or a staging site, and instead develop your website while it’s live. You won’t want Google to index your site when it’s under construction or in maintenance mode.

There are also many people who use WordPress to create private blogs. They don’t want them indexed by search engines because they’re private.

You can use WordPress for project management or an intranet. In these cases, you won’t want your internal documents to be publicly accessible.

A common misconception is that if you don’t have links pointing to your domain, then search engines will probably never find your website. This is not completely true.

For example, there may be links pointing to your site because the domain name was previously owned by someone else. Also, there are thousands of pages on the internet that simply list domain names. Your site may appear on one of those.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to stop search engines from crawling your website. We’ll cover four methods:

Method 1: Asking Search Engines not to Crawl Your WordPress Site

This is the simplest method but does not fully protect your website from being crawled.

WordPress comes with a built-in feature that allows you to instruct search engines not to index your site. All you need to do is visit Settings » Reading and check the box next to ‘Search Engine Visibility’.

When this box is checked, WordPress adds this line to your website’s header:

WordPress also modifies your site’s robots.txt file and adds these lines to it:

These lines ask robots (web crawlers) not to index your pages. However, it is totally up to search engines to accept this request or ignore it. Even though most search engines respect this, there’s still a chance that some pages or images from your site may get indexed.

If you want to make it impossible for search engines to index or crawl your website, then you will need to password protect your WordPress site using Methods 3 or 4.

Method 2: Asking Search Engines not to Crawl Individual Pages

You might want search engines to crawl and index your website, but not include certain posts or pages in search results pages.

The easiest way to do that is using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin. It is the best SEO tool for WordPress and is trusted by over 3 million businesses.

For this tutorial, we’ll be using the AIOSEO free version as it includes the SEO Analysis tool. There is also a premium version of AIOSEO that offers more features like sitemap tools, redirection manager, schema markup, robots.txt editor, and more.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the AIOSEO plugin on your website. You can learn how to install and configure the plugin by following our step by step guide on how to set up All in One SEO for WordPress.

Once the plugin is set up, you can use it to ask search engines not to index certain posts and pages. Again, it is totally up to search engines to accept this request or ignore it.

Simply edit the post or page that you don’t want to be indexed. You need to scroll down to AIOSEO Settings at the bottom of the WordPress editor and then click the ‘Advanced’ tab.

Notice that the article is using the default robots settings. To change this, you need to switch the ‘Use Default Settings’ toggle to the off position.

Now you can click the ‘No Index’ checkbox. Once the post is published or updated, search engines will be asked not to index it.

Method 3: Password Protecting an Entire Site Using cPanel

If your WordPress hosting provider offers cPanel access to manage your hosting account, then you can protect your entire site using cPanel. All you have to do is log in to your cPanel dashboard and then click on the ‘Directory Privacy’ icon in the ‘Files’ section.

Next, you need to find the folder where you installed WordPress. Usually, it is the public_html folder. After that, you need to click the ‘Edit’ button next to that folder.

This brings you to a screen where you can turn on password protection.

Simply check the box that says ‘Password protect this directory’ and click the ‘Save’ button. If you like, you can also customize the name for the protected directory.

You will see a confirmation message saying that the access permissions for the directory have been changed.

Next, you should click the ‘Go Back’ button.

You’ll be taken to a screen where you can create a username and password that will need to be used when accessing this directory.

You need to enter a username and password and then confirm the password. Make sure to note your username and password in a safe place, such as a password manager app.

Once you click the ‘Save’ button you have successfully added password protection to your WordPress site.

Now, whenever a user or search engine visits your website they will be prompted to enter the username and password you created earlier to view the site.

Method 4: Password Protecting WordPress With a Plugin

If you are using a managed WordPress hosting solution, then you may not have access to cPanel. In that case, you can use a WordPress plugin to password protect your site.

Here are the two most popular solutions:

SeedProd is the #1 coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress, used on over 800,000 websites. It comes with complete access control and permissions features that you can use to hide your website from everyone including search engines. We have a step by step how-to guide for SeedProd.Password Protected is a very simple way to password protect your WordPress site with a single password (no user creation needed). See our step by step guide on how to password protect a WordPress site.

We hope this article helped you stop search engines from crawling or indexing your WordPress site. You may also want to learn how to speed up your website performance, or see our ultimate step by step WordPress security guide for beginners.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Stop Search Engines from Crawling a WordPress Site first appeared on WPBeginner.

Are you looking to serve scaled images on your WordPress site?

Beginners often slow down their websites by uploading images without paying attention to their size. Serving images that have the correct dimensions will improve your WordPress performance without reducing quality.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily serve scaled images in WordPress.

Why Serve Scaled Images in WordPress?

On your WordPress website, you’ll need images for your blog posts, thumbnails, page headers, cover images, and more.

Depending on your theme, these images will occupy a certain number of pixels. For example, your featured image might occupy 680×382 pixels, and a thumbnail 100×100 pixels.

It is important to use images that have been scaled to fit the correct dimensions needed for your site. For example, if your featured images occupy 680×382 pixels, then you should save them at exactly that size.

Otherwise, your site can be slowed down or the quality of the user’s experience will be lowered. Here are a few of the common reasons for this:

Your visitors will have to download larger files than necessary, increasing load times. If you use images with fewer pixels than the space allowed, then they will look blurry when displayed at a larger size.Your website will have to change the image sizes on the fly, which means it has to run more processes before it can show the content to users

Regardless, it will give your users a bad experience and may also have a negative impact on your image SEO.

That’s why if you test your website performance using GTMetrix scan, it will often recommend that you serve scaled images to speed up your website.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to easily serve scaled images in WordPress. We’ll cover two methods:

Method 1: Serving Scaled Images With a Plugin

The simplest way to serve images scaled is to use a plugin that automatically displays your website images at the correct size. This method is the easiest but doesn’t allow as much flexibility as the second method.

The free Optimole plugin is one of the best WordPress image compression plugins and will automatically scale your images. However, if you get over 5,000 visitors per month, then you’ll need the premium version.

First, you need to install and activate the Optimole plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will be automatically taken to the Media » Optimole page and asked to sign up for an API key or enter your existing API key. This is very easy.

Simply make sure that your email address is correct, then click the ‘Create & connect your account’ button. The connection to Optimole will then happen automatically. You won’t even need to visit another website or manually paste the key.

Optimole will now start to optimize your images in the background. It will automatically choose the correct image size for each visitor’s device and browser, and the images will be served from the fast Optimole Cloud Service CDN.

When you click on the Settings tab, you will see that the images in your posts and pages will be automatically replaced with those optimized and scaled by Optimole.

This isn’t done on the fly because it’s through a CDN, meaning your site will not take a performance hit.

Also, the plugin has enabled lazy load, which means that images on the page that are not currently visible won’t be loaded until they are needed. This is another effective way to reduce page load time and improve website performance.

These settings will work well for most websites. However, you can customize Optimole further using the settings on the ‘Advanced’ menu to see what works best for your website.

If you make any changes to the settings, then don’t forget to click the ‘Save changes’ button at the bottom of the page.

Method 2: Serving Scaled Images Manually

You can also scale images without a plugin. There are three ways to do this: you can use the image editing software, the image editing feature in the WordPress Media Library, or by changing the values in the WordPress Media Settings.

Scaling Images With Image Editing Software

You can scale your images to the right dimensions before you upload them to your website by using photo editing software on your computer, such as Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo.

The software allows you to choose the correct number of pixels for your image and save it with a small file size and the file format you prefer.

For example, here’s a screenshot demonstrating Affinity Photo’s crop tool.

Besides getting the image size right from the beginning, there are other things you can do before you upload your images to make sure they don’t slow down your website.

For more information, see our guide on how to optimize images for web performance.

Scaling Images in the WordPress Media Library

Did you know that you can do basic image editing in WordPress? The WordPress ‘edit image’ feature allows you to crop, rotate, flip, and scale images.

When editing a post or page, you need to click on the image you wish to edit. Next, you should click the ‘Replace’ button and then select ‘Open Media Library’ from the menu.

This will open the WordPress Media Library with the image selected.

On the right is an area where you can add alt text, a title, a caption, and a description for your image. You will also find an ‘Edit Image’ link.

Just click that link to be taken to the ‘Edit image’ page.

Here you’ll find a preview of the image, editing buttons, and several other options that are useful when scaling or cropping the image.

To scale the image, simply change one of the ‘New dimensions’ values under Scale Image on the right.

For example, this image has a very large resolution of 2560×1637 pixels. We can reduce it to a width of 1200 pixels by typing in the first ‘Scale Image’ field.

All you have to change is the Width because the image’s height value will be changed change automatically to keep the image in proportion.

After that, just click the ‘Scale’ button to change the resolution of the image.

Note that you can only scale an image down in WordPress. You cannot make images larger by increasing the image dimensions.

For detailed instructions, see our guides on how to do basic image editing in WordPress and how to crop and edit WordPress post thumbnails.

Adjusting Image Sizes in Media Settings

When you upload images to your website, WordPress automatically creates several copies in different sizes. You can customize these sizes by visiting the Settings » Media page in your WordPress admin area.

Here, you can easily change the dimensions for thumbnail, medium, and large image sizes.

On some websites, you may need more image sizes than just thumbnail, medium, and large. You can learn how to create these sizes by following our guide on how to create additional image sizes in WordPress.

If you change the default image sizes or create additional image sizes, then only new images will be affected. You need to regenerate the image sizes for existing images.

When you add an image to a post or page, you can select an image size in the block settings on the left of the page.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to serve scaled images in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to create a landing page or check out our list of social media plugins for WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Easily Serve Scaled Images in WordPress (Step by Step) first appeared on WPBeginner.