WordPress wish list for 2019

The holiday season is approaching, so as you put together your shopping lists, we thought it would also be fun to put together a feature wish list for WordPress heading into 2019. Here are 5 new features we hope WordPress will incorporate next year.

1. Schedule updates to content

For awhile now, WordPress has had the ability to schedule the date a post or a page will publish. But once it’s live, you can only make changes immediately. Why not add the ability to schedule a change to a post or page in the future? This would be incredibly handy for limited-time offers or adding content to a page at a later time once a new product goes live or if information needs to be changed in the future.

2. Featured video

When you create content in WordPress, it’s really important to add a featured image as it serves as a thumbnail for a particular page. Social media sites use featured as thumbnails for your content unless you specify a different image manually and many themes use them on blog pages. But what if you wanted to use video instead? Sure, you can install a plugin like Featured Video Plus to do the trick, but in a world where video is so prominent on the Internet, adding featured video natively only makes sense.

3. Built-in SEO

Lots of plugins like Yoast SEO offer advanced search engine optimization features, but WordPress offers nothing out of the box. The WordPress mantra seems to be to keep core features simple and allow plugins to fill in the gaps, but SEO is important enough that WordPress should probably address it directly. The feature set wouldn’t need to be as robust as the leading SEO plugins out there, but it would be nice to see WordPress offer the ability to edit search engine meta descriptions, OpenGraph tags, and a few other important search engine and social media fields natively.

4. Site stats

WordPress offers site stats through the Jetpack plugin, but even not every user knows about even the most widely used plugins. Jetpack essentially makes the features that WordPress.com offers available to self-hosted WordPress users, so why not simply build those into WordPress core? Some of Jetpack’s features are more important than others, but something is basic as site stats would be a good starting place.

5. Expanded Gutenberg functionality

Most of the items on this list are purely hypothetical and aspirational, and we have no idea if any of them will ever happen. However, this item is the one direction we know WordPress is headed for sure. Matt Mullenweg has indicated his desire to see Gutenberg extend to the header, menus, footer, widgets, and other areas of the website, and it’s only a matter of time until WordPress makes this happen.

Which of these would you like to see most? What other features do you think WordPress is missing? Let us know in the comments.

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