On Friday 20th February WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 was released and, as usual, I jumped in to beta test it. As you may know, this season sees the return of the traditional three annual major updates.
The first of these will be 7.0, which is scheduled for 9 April 2026. Here you can consult the calendar in case you want to try one of them.
One thing to note is that WordPress 7.0 will no longer support PHP 7.2 and PHP 7.3 and the minimum supported version will be PHP 7.4.0, although the minimum recommended version will remain PHP 8.3. However, full support for PHP 8.0 / 8.3 and "beta" support for PHP 8.4 and PHP 8.5 is declared.
I'm not particularly excited about what's new in this new version (although I'm struck by the responsiveness of the new multi-user real-time collaboration option) and I know it's still premature to venture into performance testing, which is what interests me most (improvements are supposed to come for faster and smoother editing), but I can't resist trying it out as soon as the first beta appears.
WordPress 7.0 introduces client-side media processing, leveraging the browser's capabilities to handle tasks such as image resizing and compression for smoother image processing. This enables the use of more advanced image formats and compression techniques, and reduces demand on the web server, providing a more efficient media handling process for both new and existing content, and supporting smoother media workflows.
The first thing you notice is the slight aesthetic change in terms of the desktop colours, which are now more contrasting. Selected items are now less pastel blue and more traditional "hyperlinked" and greys are darker.
I like the overhaul of the revisions. It is now much more visual and the comparison of revisions is well simplified. In the example the word "test" was added at the end of the second paragraph and deleted in a second edition.
This is what is shown now: the paragraph highlighted in gold and the deleted word crossed out. In addition, a link to the classic version of the revisions is added in case you don't want anything to change or think it was better.
In this first beta I find no problems with the responsiveness of the desktop, everything is moving well so far. With the tinkering, small changes are being discovered, such as the header block settings, which keeps the traditional drop-down and adds a header selector in the block settings.
We have a new Breadcrumb block. It is about time. It is appreciated. To add them we had to fiddle around with various SEO plugins or functions. They have a couple of useful basic settings: Show navigation path (show or not show the home page) and Show current navigation path (show or not show the title of the post). At the moment it is not possible to hide the category.
And another premiere block. The icon block. When you add it and click on "Choose icon" you have a lot of SVG icons available, more than 80.
This has been a quick first approach, but there is still a lot to tinker with. If you want to know what else you can try out in this first beta, here is the detailed list of new features.
Remember that to test any development version of WordPress, you should always do it in a staging environment, never on a production site. To do this you can use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin and uninstall it once you have finished your testing.
Simply tick these two options to receive only Beta and RC versions.
