WordPress just dropped its first major release of 2025—WordPress 6.8, and it’s packed with thoughtful improvements aimed at making your site faster, your editing smoother, and your experience better overall.
Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just managing your small business site, here’s a quick breakdown of what’s new and exciting in WordPress 6.8—and why you might want to hit that update button (after backing up, of course 😉).
If you use WordPress’s Site Editor, you’re in for a treat.
✨ Revamped Design Controls
The Global Styles panel has had a glow-up—everything from typography to spacing is now easier to manage and tweak, all from a central menu.
Even better? The Style Book feature—previously available only to block themes—is now accessible in classic themesthat support editor styles. That means more flexibility without having to redesign your whole site.
Managing pages and posts just got more efficient.
Customizable Data Views: You can now choose exactly what columns show up when you’re browsing through your pages or templates.
Density Settings: New layout options let you pick between Comfortable, Balanced, or Compact views—so you can manage content your way.
This is a small but powerful upgrade for content-heavy sites or anyone who values a clean dashboard experience.
Blocks are the heart of WordPress, and 6.8 brings some cool new options:
Query Total Block: Display the number of posts or items returned by a query—great for blog indexes, search pages, or archives.
Query Loop Tweaks: You can now ignore sticky posts in your loops. It’s a subtle but important control for cleaner content display.
Speed and security are front and center in this release.
Speculative Loading: Using the new Speculation Rules API, WordPress can now preload likely next pages based on user behavior. Translation: faster page loads and a smoother experience.
Stronger Password Hashing: WordPress has moved to bcrypt, a modern algorithm that adds extra protection to user credentials.
Under the hood, 6.8 has added some tools and optimizations just for developers:
Register multiple block types at once with a new helper function, reducing redundancy and improving load times.
Performance warnings for useSelect: The dev console now warns you when this hook is slowing things down, helping you code smarter.
If you’re hosting with us, we’ve got your back! But as always:
Make a full backup.
Test updates on a staging site if you use custom code or plugins.
Then, go ahead and hit that update button.
WordPress 6.8 is a clean, focused release that smooths out rough edges without throwing any curveballs. It’s a win across the board—especially for users who care about design freedom, faster speeds, and future-ready tech.
Need help updating? Questions about compatibility? Our support team is just a click away.
Happy updating! 🛠️💙