WordPress 6.6 was released on 16 July 2024 under the codename ‘Dorsey’, in honour of Tommy Dorsey, the trombonist and big band leader. This release offers more design options for block templates, but for site administrators, the two most important changes take place behind the scenes: automatic plugin updates are now more secure, and the minimum PHP version requirement has been raised.

Automatic plugin updates with rollback

If your site encounters an error following an automatic plugin update, WordPress will now revert to the previous version of the plugin. This means that enabling automatic updates carries less risk, and security fixes will be applied to your site more quickly. You can read about how to configure automatic plugin updates in our guide on automatic plugin updates, and about the update process in our article on updating plugins securely.

Design and editing

• Colour and font schemes: you can also choose specific colour or font schemes from the style variations of the block templates, allowing you to try out several combinations within a single template whilst staying true to the template’s overall look and feel.
• New page view in the website editor: the list of pages and a preview of the selected page are displayed side by side.
• Overrides in synchronised templates: you can modify the content of the Heading, Paragraph, Button and Image blocks in individual instances of a synchronised template, whilst the template’s style remains consistent throughout.

Performance and accessibility

Version 6.6 removes unnecessary WP_Theme_JSON calls and polyfill dependencies that are no longer required, and disables autoloading for large configuration sets, which helps pages that are slowed down by the wp_options_table. Embedded posts now feature lazy loading, the Interactivity API has a new data-wp-on-async directive, and templates in the editor load roughly 35 per cent faster. Accessibility has been improved by 58 fixes, mainly in data views and the insert panel.

The minimum PHP version is 7.2.24

From version 6.6 onwards, WordPress no longer supports PHP 7.0 and 7.1, as in April 2024 these two versions combined accounted for only 2.45 per cent of monitored sites. The new minimum requirement is PHP 7.2.24; sites running on older versions of PHP will remain on the 6.5 branch. Version 6.6 is compatible with PHP versions between 7.2 and 8.3; PHP 7.4 or later is recommended.

On our WordPress hosting plans, you can select the PHP version via the control panel; in cPanel, you can change it via the ‘Select PHP Version’ interface. Our article on the best PHP version for WordPress will help you decide which version to choose.

Update

Make a backup before updating, and before switching PHP versions, it’s worth testing the site in a test environment. You can start the update from the Updates menu in the control panel or via WP Toolkit.

Backported security fixes for the 6.6 branch were last available in October 2026 with release 6.6.10, but officially only the latest major version is ever supported. Full details can be found in the 6.6 release notes and the developer’s guide.

The previous major release was WordPress 6.5 ‘Regina’, and the next one will be WordPress 6.7 ‘Rollins’.

• wordpress
• release
• news
• php
• website security