WordPress 6.1 was released on 1 November 2022 under the codename ‘Misha’, in honour of Mikhail ‘Misha’ Alperin, a Ukrainian-born jazz pianist and founding member of the Moscow Art Trio. More than 800 contributors from over 60 countries worked on this year’s third major release. At the time of the announcement, WordPress powered 43 per cent of the world’s websites.

This release makes website building more predictable and introduces many small writing-related improvements. If you’re working with block templates on your WordPress hosting, from version 6.1 onwards you’ll be able to customise far more without having to write any code.

Twenty Twenty-Three: ten styles in one template

The new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, is based on the style variations introduced in version 6.0: it features ten different styles, which you can switch between with a single click, without having to change the theme. The theme has been awarded the ‘Accessibility Ready’ label, meaning it meets WordPress’s accessibility requirements.

Templates, menus and blocks

• New templates: you can now create custom templates for posts and pages in the website editor, whilst header and footer template sections can be created and replaced more quickly.
• Simpler menu management: the Navigation block automatically opens the existing menu; selecting and editing menus now has its own section in the block’s settings; and there is a choice of several icons for the mobile menu.
• One-click locking: locking the Group, Cover and Columns blocks can be extended to all blocks within them.
• Only the content can be edited: the layout of the content blocks can be locked, so authors can modify the text but cannot alter the structure. This prevents a great deal of frustration when pages are handed over to clients.
• The List and Quote blocks can also contain nested blocks; for example, a heading can be included within a quote.
• The block placeholders already display the chosen style; for example, the Image block shows the border and the duotone filter even without an image.
• Post and page settings, such as the template selector and scheduling, have been moved to a clearer dashboard.

Design tools

• Fluid typography: you can specify in block templates and the theme.json file that the font size should adapt to the screen width.
• Spacing presets: margins and line spacing can be selected from predefined values, so there is no need to work with manually entered values.
• The style of buttons, quotes and links can be customised globally, whilst the default content width of the templates can be overridden in the Styles panel.
• These templates are now available as starter templates for any post type, not just pages.
• WordPress saves the website editor settings for each user, so they are retained regardless of the browser or device used.

For developers

Classic templates can also use block template parts (in the parts directory at the root of the template), variants of the Query block can be assigned custom queries, and the style engine manages CSS rules for margins, spacing, typography, colour and borders in one place. You can filter for block templates in the template directory.

Performance, accessibility and other changes

Version 6.1 addresses more than 25 performance issues, whilst nearly 60 changes improve accessibility. On new installations, the website subtitle is left blank by default, and WordPress displays an estimated reading time for authors. This release is compatible with PHP versions 5.6 through 8.2; we’ve outlined which one you should choose in our article on the best PHP version for WordPress.

Update

Make a backup before the major update, and if you use a lot of plugins, try the update on a test site first. You can start the update from the Updates menu in the control panel or via WP Toolkit.

Two weeks after its release, on 15 November 2022, the first bugfix release, WordPress 6.1.1, was released. The security fixes backported to the 6.1 branch were current as of the 6.1.15 release in October 2026; however, officially, only the latest major version is ever supported. Full details can be found in the 6.1 release notes and the developer guide.

The previous major release was WordPress 6.0 ‘Arturo’, and the next one will be WordPress 6.2 ‘Dolphy’.

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