WordPress 6.5 was released on 2 April 2024 under the codename ‘Regina’, in honour of jazz violinist Regina Carter. The release improves font management, version history and the site editor, whilst providing developers with two new APIs that have formed the basis for subsequent releases.

Font library

With the new Font Library, you can install, activate and remove fonts without writing any code, whether from any block template, an uploaded file of your own, or the Google Fonts collection. The site serves the installed fonts from its own hosting, so visitors’ browsers do not need to fetch them from Google’s servers.

Editing and design

• Revision history: with timestamps, a brief summary and a scrollable list; available for templates and template parts, whilst the Style Book shows how each change affects the blocks.
• Background and shadow: the size, repeat pattern and focal point of the Group block’s background image can be adjusted; the aspect ratio of the Cover block can be specified; and the colour layer can take its colour from the image. Several blocks now feature shadow settings.
• Data Views: pages, templates, samples and template parts can be listed in a table or grid view; fields can be toggled on or off and edited in bulk.
• Smoother drag-and-drop and simpler link management, with a keyboard shortcut for copying links.

For developers

• Interactivity API: a unified method for building interactive front-end features using blocks, such as search results that update instantly, whilst requiring fewer external tools and delivering good performance.
• Block Bindings API: the attributes of built-in blocks can be bound to custom fields or other dynamic data sources without having to write a custom block.
• Styling options for classic templates: spacing, border, font and colour settings can be enabled even without a theme.json file.
• Plugin dependencies: plugins can specify which other plugins they require in a new Requires Plugins header; WordPress will then install and activate these first.

Faster editor, AVIF images

This release includes more than 110 performance improvements: the post and site editors load more than twice as fast as in version 6.4, whilst text processing is up to five times faster. Translated pages, such as those in Hungarian, load up to 25 per cent faster thanks to the Performant Translations solution.

The media library now also accepts AVIF images, which are typically smaller than JPEGs whilst maintaining the same quality. We’ve written about choosing image formats in our WordPress image optimisation guide. Accessibility has been improved by more than 65 changes, including one that makes the admin sub-menu accessible to those navigating with a screen reader and keyboard.

System requirements

In version 6.5, the minimum MySQL version was raised from 5.0 to 5.5.5; support for MySQL 5.0 was discontinued back in 2012. This release is compatible with PHP versions ranging from 7.0 to 8.3. Our WordPress hosting plans run on a MariaDB database and an optional PHP version, so these requirements do not pose any problems.

Update

Make a backup before updating, and you can start the update from the Updates menu in the control panel or via WP Toolkit. The backported security fixes for the 6.5 branch were last available in October 2026 with release 6.5.13; however, only the latest major version is officially supported at any given time. Full details can be found in the 6.5 release notes and the developer’s guide.

The previous major release was WordPress 6.4 ‘Shirley’, and the next one will be WordPress 6.6 ‘Dorsey’.

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