English
Magyar
WordPress 6.9 was released on 2 December 2025 under the codename ‘Gene’, in honour of jazz pianist Gene Harris. The release facilitates collaborative work within the editor, speeds up the front end and, with the Abilities API, lays the foundations for WordPress’s artificial intelligence-based features.
Notes on the blocks
You can now add comments to individual blocks in the post and page editor. Team members can provide feedback directly alongside the content, track changes, and have the feedback converted into a task in one place. This is particularly useful when several authors, or an editor and a client, are working on the same text.
Command palette across the entire control panel
The command palette (⌘+K or Ctrl+K) is now available not only in the editor, but throughout the control panel, including the list of extensions.
New blocks and editing options
- Accordion: expandable, collapsible content with a custom style, for example for FAQs.
- Math: mathematical equations in MathML or LaTeX format, either as blocks or inline, and even in tables and headings.
- Terms Query, Comments Link and Comments Count blocks, as well as improved Heading and Reading Time blocks.
- Text alignment with the container: the font size of the Paragraph and Heading blocks can automatically fill the available space, which is useful for banners and highlights.
- Hiding blocks: you can hide and then show a block again with a single click.
Abilities API
The Abilities API provides a unified register of what a WordPress site and the plugins running on it are capable of. Developers can register, check and execute these operations from PHP, via the REST API or from an AI agent. In addition, the provider-independent PHP AI Client and the MCP Adapter have been released as separate packages; the latter makes the site’s capabilities available to AI assistants via the Model Context Protocol. WordPress 7.0’s built-in AI support is based on these components.
Faster page loading
Version 6.9 mainly improves the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score: classic templates now only load styles for blocks that are actually used, block template styles are delivered in a minimised form, the limit on inline styles has been increased, and non-critical scripts are given a lower priority. It also brings optimised database queries, improved caching and more efficient WP-Cron execution. We’ve written a separate article on the causes of WordPress slowdowns.
Accessibility has been improved by more than 30 fixes, mainly relating to screen reader notifications and cursor handling.
PHP 8.5 and the final release of PHP 7.2
Version 6.9 is compatible with PHP versions 7.2 through 8.5. This is the last major version that still runs on PHP 7.2 and 7.3: from version 7.0 onwards, the minimum requirement is PHP 7.4; websites running on older versions of PHP will remain on the 6.9 branch. If your site is still running on one of these versions, it’s worth switching now; on our WordPress hosting plans, you can select the PHP version via the control panel.
Update
Before updating, make a backup, then start the update from the Updates menu in the control panel or via WP Toolkit. The backported security fixes for the 6.9 branch were last available in October 2026 with release 6.9.10, but officially only the latest major version is ever supported. Full details can be found in the 6.9 release notes and the developer’s guide.
The previous major release was WordPress 6.8 ‘Cecil’, and the next one will be WordPress 7.0 ‘Armstrong’.