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WordPress 6.8 “Cecil” is now out!
Named after the legendary pianist and jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor, 6.8 is the first major update of 2025. Like Cecil, it’s here to defy expectation, finding form in disorder and harmony in dissonance.
“Cecil” emerges from the collective effort of more than 900 contributors across 60+ countries around the globe, and like its predecessors, it does not disappoint in terms of updates.
Source: WordPress X account
There are more than 300 Core Trac tickets included in WordPress 6.8, along with:
But that’s not all.
The Block Editor alone got 387 enhancements, 525 bug fixes, and 70 accessibility improvements.
Simply put, WordPress 6.8 improves the tools that you use every day, making your site faster, more secure, and easier to manage.
Let’s dive deeper.
WordPress 6.8 brings a noticeable boost in speed and responsiveness across the board. One of the most exciting enhancements is how the platform now anticipates what users might click next, making page transitions feel faster and smoother than ever.
These updates aim to reduce delays, improve user experience, and help site owners meet key performance metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) with less effort.
One of the standout features in WordPress 6.8 is Speculative Loading—a behind-the-scenes performance upgrade that helps pages load faster before you even realize it.
When a visitor hovers over or clicks a link, WordPress may automatically preload that page in the background. That means by the time they land on the next page, much of the heavy lifting has already been done. It’s a smoother, near-instant experience and a big step forward for frontend performance.
This feature was first introduced as the Speculative Loading plugin, released a year ago. It’s been running successfully on over 50,000 WordPress sites, where it’s proven its worth.
Data from the HTTP Archive and Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) showed that sites using speculative loading saw a ~1.9% improvement in their LCP passing rate. Although it may sound like a small improvement, in web performance terms, it’s a significant gain.
Currently, Chrome, Edge, and Opera support the underlying Speculation Rules API. That means the vast majority of users visiting your WordPress site can already benefit from this speed boost.
Good to Know
By default, speculative loading is now enabled in the front end of all WordPress 6.8 sites, unless a user is logged in or the site has pretty permalinks disabled. WordPress uses a conservative approach—prefetching is triggered when a user starts to click a link, not just on hover. Learn how to modify behavior.
WordPress 6.8 lays the groundwork for even snappier interactions, thanks to continued improvements to the Interactivity API.
Right now, when a user clicks or taps something on your site, the browser might need to process a bunch of actions at once, which sometimes might cause a slight delay. That delay can hurt INP (Interaction to Next Paint), a key performance metric Google uses to measure how quickly your site responds to user input.
Starting with 6.8, the Interactivity API begins shifting towards handling actions asynchronously by default. In simple terms, this helps spread out the work and avoid long, clunky wait times when someone interacts with your site.
If you are interested in learning more, check out the official documentation.
In WordPress 6.8, the Style Book gets a sleek new look and a few smart upgrades that make managing your site’s design even easier.
You’ll now see a cleaner layout with clearer labels, giving you a more organized view of your site’s colors, typography, and block styles all in one place. It’s like having a live design guide at your fingertips.
Source: Kinsta
The Style Book has also become more accessible. You can now open it directly from the Styles menu in the Editor sidebar, making it easier to jump in and start tweaking.
And here’s another bonus:
The Style Book now works with Classic themes, too. As long as they use editor-styles or a theme.json file. That means more sites can benefit from this visual editing tool, no matter what theme they’re using.
“Cecil” keeps the momentum going with a more refined and flexible Block Editor, introducing updates that make site building smoother, more intuitive, and easier to manage.
Originally introduced in WordPress 6.5, Data Views are quickly becoming a powerful way to organize and manage pages, templates, patterns, and more inside the Site Editor.
6.8 Data Views get even better, focusing on customization and usability. You can now tailor what you see in the page view by adding properties like Preview, Slug, Parent, Discussion, Template, and Password. Preview options have also been added to Patterns and Templates, making it easier to scan and edit your content at a glance.
Source: Kinsta
There’s also a new density control for the table layout. Whether you prefer a more spacious view or want to see more items at once, you can switch between Comfortable, Balanced, and Compact modes to match your editing style.
The Block Editor also gets a number of subtle but meaningful enhancements that add up to a better editing flow.
All in all, WordPress 6.8 delivers a more polished and predictable experience—whether you're building pages, customizing templates, or just making quick edits.
Although it’s not related to an interface change or user experience, this next improvement takes the top spot for us:
WordPress 6.8 steps up your site’s security without you needing to lift a finger.
The platform now uses bcrypt hashing to protect user passwords, making them much harder to crack. Even if someone were to gain access to your database, breaking into accounts would require significantly more time and computing power.
But that’s not all.
WordPress has also improved how it secures things like application passwords, password reset links, and recovery mode keys, using faster and safer encryption methods behind the scenes.
And the best part? You don’t need to do anything. These changes happen automatically. Your existing passwords still work, sessions stay active, and there's no need to reset anything after updating.
So, even if none of the other improvements grabbed your attention—this one’s worth the update.
This is not an exhaustive list of all the enhancements in the latest WordPress update. The WordPress 6.8 field guide includes many others, such as:
All excellent reasons to download WordPress 6.8.
Remember to back up your website beforehand. And as always, if you want to pass your Core Web Vitals and boost your site's performance, install NitroPack.
Niko has 5+ years of experience turning those “it’s too technical for me” topics into “I can’t believe I get it” content pieces. He specializes in dissecting nuanced topics like Core Web Vitals, web performance metrics, and site speed optimization techniques. When he’s taking a breather from researching his next content piece, you’ll find him deep into the latest performance news.
