WordPress 6.3 was released on 8 August 2023 under the codename ‘Lionel’, in honour of vibraphonist, pianist and bandleader Lionel Hampton. According to release manager Matías Ventura, version 6.3 is the culmination of several years’ work on block-based page building. More than 650 contributors from at least 52 countries worked on this release, 205 of whom were first-time contributors.

There are two changes worth paying particular attention to for sites running on our WordPress hosting: support for PHP 5 is being discontinued, and following a failed update, WordPress will revert to the previous version of the plugin or theme.

Everything in the website builder

The website editor is where your content, templates and layouts are first brought together in one place. You can also create new pages here, browse through style variations and fine-tune your navigation menus.

• Block template preview: you can try out and customise a block template in the website editor before switching to it.
• Synchronised templates: the former ‘reusable blocks’ are now called synchronised templates. You can collect them in the My Templates section; when synchronised, any changes will appear everywhere, whilst without synchronisation, you can use them as a starting point.
• Command palette: use the ⌘+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows) keyboard shortcut to quickly switch to a template, open the settings or perform other actions.
• Style version history: on the timeline, you can see what your site looked like at a specific point in time, and restore previous styles with a single click.

New blocks and design tools

• Footnotes block: you can add a footnote linked to any paragraph.
• ‘Details’ block: you can hide content under a heading, for example for FAQs or longer explanations.
• The style of image captions can be adjusted without using code; duotone filters can be managed via the Styles panel; and the Cover block now features text colour, layout and border settings.
• You can specify the aspect ratio for images, which is particularly useful in templates to maintain the intended appearance.
• Distraction-free mode is now available in the website editor too, with a revamped top toolbar and drag-and-drop functionality at every level of the list view.

Performance

Version 6.3 brings over 170 performance improvements. The Scripts API now supports defer and async loading; images can now have a fetchpriority attribute; and improvements have been made to template unloading, lazy loading of images and the emoji loader. These changes primarily improve perceived load times. Accessibility has been enhanced by more than 50 changes.

Support for PHP 5 is being discontinued

From version 6.3 onwards, the minimum PHP version is 7.0.0; sites running on PHP 5.6 will remain on the 6.2 branch. Version 6.3 is compatible with PHP versions ranging from 7.0 to 8.2. If your site is still running on an older version of PHP, our article on the best PHP version for WordPress will help you make the switch; you can change the version in cPanel by following the guide on how to set the default PHP version.

Protection against failed updates: if a manual update of a plugin or theme is interrupted, WordPress automatically reverts to the previously installed version.

Update

Before updating, back up the page, then start the update from the Updates menu in the control panel or via WP Toolkit. Security fixes from the 6.3 branch were backported as late as October 2026 (6.3.13), but officially only the latest major version is supported. Details can be found in the 6.3 release notes and the developer’s guide.

The previous major release was WordPress 6.2 ‘Dolphy’, and the next one will be WordPress 6.4 ‘Shirley’.

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