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WordPress 6.2 was released on 29 March 2023 under the codename ‘Dolphy’, in honour of the jazz saxophonist, flautist and bass clarinettist Eric Dolphy. The first major release of the year contains more than 900 improvements and fixes, and marks a turning point in WordPress’s roadmap: following the customisation phase, the developers’ focus is now shifting towards workflows and collaborative editing.
If you’re using a block template on your WordPress hosting, this release is the one where the site editor is no longer an experimental feature.
The website editor has come out of beta
The Site Editor has been given a new interface: you can browse full previews of templates and template sections, and start editing them from anywhere. The navigation menus can be managed in a new sidebar, and menu items can be added, deleted and rearranged more quickly.
The block settings have been organised into two tabs (Settings and Styles), making it easier to find what you’re looking for. New header and footer templates have been added to the block templates, allowing you to quickly put together the framework of a page.
Insert mode, Openverse and interference-free mode
- On the new ‘Media’ tab of the block inserter, you can drag and drop images from the media library directly into your content.
- In the examples, the split view displays both the categories and the preview at the same time.
- Openverse’s collection of over 700 million freely licensed images and audio files is accessible directly from the embedder.
- Distraction-free mode: you can hide all panels and controls whilst writing.
Style Book, style copying and custom CSS
The Style Book shows you what every block on your site looks like in one place, so you can see the effect of changing global styles straight away. You can copy a block’s style and apply it to another block, and you can also specify custom CSS alongside the design tools.
More news:
- Sticky positioning: top-level Group blocks can remain at the top of the page when scrolling.
- Transferring widgets: when switching from a classic template to a block template, widgets can be imported.
- Cacheable fonts: the default WordPress themes now load Google Fonts directly from their own hosting. We’ve covered this in detail in our article on caching Google Fonts.
Faster loading times
According to the announcement, pages using block templates load 14–18 per cent faster, whilst those using classic templates load 2–5 per cent faster. Server-side processing has been accelerated by 17–23 per cent for block templates and by 3–5 per cent for classic templates.
WordPress 6.2 is compatible with PHP versions ranging from 5.6 to 8.2. You can change the PHP version for your hosting account in cPanel via the ‘Select PHP Version’ interface.
Update
Always make a backup before a 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.
Officially, only the latest major version is ever supported; however, security fixes are backported to older branches wherever possible: the 6.2 branch was at release 6.2.14 in October 2026. Full details can be found in the 6.2 release notes and the developer’s guide.
The previous major release was WordPress 6.1 ‘Misha’ (with a bugfix release, WordPress 6.1.1), and the next one will be WordPress 6.3 ‘Lionel’.