WordPress 6.0 was released on 24 May 2022 under the codename ‘Arturo’, in honour of Grammy Award-winning Latin jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill. The second major release of the year includes nearly 1,000 improvements and bug fixes, and takes the block editor a step further towards Full Site Editing. At the time of the announcement, WordPress was already powering more than 42 per cent of the world’s websites.

If your site, installed on your WordPress hosting, uses block templates, this release provides you with many tools that previously required code or a separate plugin.

More convenient writing

• Selecting across multiple blocks: you can select and copy text across multiple paragraphs, not just block by block.
• Quick internal links: typing two opening square brackets ([[) brings up a list of the latest posts and pages.
• Styles are retained: if you change a block to a different type, for example from a paragraph to a code block, the style you have set will remain.
• Buttons: the new buttons automatically adopt the style of the previously customised buttons.
• The tag cloud and social media icons have been given new settings, and the tag cloud now features an outline style.

A change of style and new templates

Block templates can now include multiple style variations. Within a single template, you can switch to a different colour scheme, font weight and overall look with just a few clicks, without having to change the template itself.

The website editor has been updated with five new template types: author, date, category, tag and taxonomy. In addition to these:

• The featured image can also be used in the ‘Cover’ block and has been given new resizing settings;
• The quick insert feature also suggests patterns and template fragments whilst you’re editing templates;
• The ‘Query’ block can filter by multiple authors and custom taxonomies, and you can configure what appears when no results are found.

Patterns appear in several places, such as when creating a new header or footer, and template creators can also register Pattern Directory patterns in the theme.json file.

Design tools, list view and block locking

• A more space-efficient colour palette, simpler border settings and transparency levels for colours.
• The new ‘stack’ and ‘row’ versions of the Group block make it easier to arrange blocks one below the other or side by side, whilst in the Gallery block, the spacing between images can be adjusted.
• The list view opens collapsed by default; when an item is selected, it jumps to the selected block, and keyboard shortcuts can be used to select and move multiple blocks within it.
• Block locking: you can disable the ability to move, delete or both a block. This is particularly useful for pages handed over to clients, where the client can edit the content without accidentally breaking the structure.

If you haven’t yet decided whether to use a block editor or a separate page builder, our article on Elementor and Gutenberg will help you make your choice.

Performance and accessibility

Version 6.0 brings faster page and post loading, shorter query times, improved caching and faster navigation menus. Accessibility has been improved through more than 50 changes.

WordPress 6.0 is compatible with PHP versions ranging from 5.6 to 8.1. We’ve explained which version you should choose in our article entitled ‘The best PHP version for WordPress’.

Update

Before updating to a major version, make a backup and check whether your plugins and theme already support the new version. You can start the update from the Updates menu in the control panel, and in WP Toolkit you can update all your sites from a single location.

WordPress officially only ever supports the latest major version; security fixes are backported to older branches where possible, so the 6.0 branch was at version 6.0.17 in October 2026. Details can be found in the 6.0 release notes and the developer guide.

The next major release, WordPress 6.1 ‘Misha’, was released on 1 November 2022, followed two weeks later by the WordPress 6.1.1 maintenance release.

• wordpress
• release
• news
• building a website