WordPress 6.4 was released on 7 November 2023 under the codename ‘Shirley’, in honour of the jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn. According to Josepha Haden Chomphosy, Executive Director of WordPress, most of the new features in this release fall into the ‘small but powerful’ category: minor changes that save time for both editors and developers.

The new default theme: Twenty Twenty-Four

The biggest new feature of this release is the new default theme. Twenty Twenty-Four is designed for three different use cases – writers, creators and businesses – and includes over 35 layouts and templates, meaning it can be adapted to almost any site with just a few tweaks. If you’re launching a new site on your WordPress hosting, it can be a good starting point rather than creating your own theme from scratch.

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• New keyboard shortcuts in list view, smarter list merging and more comprehensive link settings.
• The Navigation, List and Quote blocks now share a common toolbar.
• The command palette introduced in version 6.3 has been revamped and expanded to include commands relating to blocks.
• You can rename Group blocks; their names will also appear in the list view; previews of the Gallery and Image blocks are also visible in the list view.

Templates, images and design tools

• Template categories: you can organise your own templates into custom categories and filter them in the sidebar.
• Exporting and importing templates: you can transfer your templates from the website editor to another site as a JSON file.
• Image enlargement (lightbox): visitors can view the image in full-screen mode with a single click; this feature can be enabled for the entire site or for individual images only.
• Background images in Group blocks, aspect ratio for placeholders, and buttons without code in the Navigation block.

For developers: Block Hooks

With Block Hooks, plugins can automatically insert dynamic blocks at specified points in block templates, such as a shopping basket icon in the header. Users can still move, edit or remove the inserted blocks.

Performance and other changes

Version 6.4 includes over 100 performance improvements: faster theme loading (including for Twenty Twenty-Four), the use of defer and async script loading in the core, blocks and themes, and optimisation of automatically loaded settings (autoload).

• Attachment pages: on new installations, separate attachment pages for media files are disabled by default; these previously generated many thin, redundant pages for search engines.
• PHP: WordPress recommends PHP 8.1 or 8.2 for version 6.4; the release is compatible with versions ranging from PHP 7.0 to 8.3. We’ve covered this in detail in our article on the best PHP version for WordPress.

Update

Before updating, make a backup and check whether your plugins already support the new version. You can start the update from the Updates menu in the control panel or via WP Toolkit.

As of October 2026, the backported security fixes for the 6.4 branch were up to release 6.4.13; however, only the latest major version was officially supported. Details can be found in the 6.4 release notes and the developer’s guide.

The previous major release was WordPress 6.3 ‘Lionel’, and the next one will be WordPress 6.5 ‘Regina’.

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