The first beta for Word­Press 6.9 is now avail­able for test­ing. When it’s offi­cial­ly released lat­er this year, it will be the sec­ond and final major Word­Press update of 2025.

This ver­sion will bring big improve­ments to writ­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and per­for­mance. For exam­ple, you’ll see block-lev­el Notes for feed­back, the abil­i­ty to hide blocks on the front end, and a Com­mand Palette that now works across the dashboard. 

There will also be plen­ty of new blocks and notice­able speed boosts.

In this arti­cle, we’ll show you what’s com­ing in Word­Press 6.9, com­plete with screen­shots and exam­ples of how each fea­ture works.

Here’s a quick overview of the changes com­ing in Word­Press 6.9:

Collaborate with Block-Level “Notes”

Word­Press 6.9 is tak­ing the first step toward a more col­lab­o­ra­tive edit­ing expe­ri­ence, sim­i­lar to Google Docs.

A new fea­ture called “Notes” (for­mer­ly known as ‘Block Com­ments’) lets you attach com­ments direct­ly to indi­vid­ual blocks.

Sim­ply click on a block and, under the block tool­bar, click on the three-dot but­ton and select the ‘Add note’ option to leave a note.

Users can reply to a note by sim­ply typ­ing their reply below it. They can also click the check but­ton to mark a note as resolved. 

You can also view all the notes attached to a post or page by click­ing on the Notes but­ton at the top-right cor­ner of the Edit screen. 

From here, you can click on a note to view the block where the note was added. 

This allows teams, agen­cies, and free­lancers to leave feed­back and share ideas direct­ly with­in the edi­tor. It’s per­fect for real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion and helps cre­ate a more effi­cient edi­to­r­i­al work­flow.

But don’t wor­ry, because these Notes are only for the edi­tor and will not appear on your live site.

Hide Blocks on the Front End (Block Visibility)

Anoth­er major addi­tion in Word­Press 6.9 is the abil­i­ty to hide blocks on your live site.

This new “Hide Blocks on Fron­tend” fea­ture lets you keep blocks in the edi­tor while mak­ing them invis­i­ble to your visitors.

To hide a block, just click the three-dot menu in the block tool­bar and then select ‘Hide’.

The hid­den block will dis­ap­pear from the block edi­tor can­vas. You can now save your post or page and pre­view it, and the block will not appear on your live site.

To restore a hid­den block, click on the Out­line but­ton in the edi­tor tool­bar. There, you will see your hid­den block. You can now click on the vis­i­bil­i­ty but­ton to make the block vis­i­ble again. 

This is per­fect for stag­ing new con­tent, explor­ing alter­nate designs, or leav­ing inter­nal notes with­out cre­at­ing sep­a­rate drafts. 

Improved Template and Theme Switching 

Have you ever worked on a cus­tom tem­plate in the Full Site Edi­tor and lat­er found it miss­ing when you switched themes?

Word­Press 6.9 will fix this prob­lem. Your cus­tom tem­plates will be retained even when you switch themes, and you can reuse them with oth­er themes. 

This update also gives you more con­trol over your templates. 

You can now cre­ate drafts before pub­lish­ing, acti­vate or deac­ti­vate tem­plates as need­ed, and eas­i­ly dupli­cate them.

New and Enhanced Blocks 

This release also expands your design options with sev­er­al new blocks.

1. Accor­dion Block 

Pre­vi­ous­ly, many Word­Press users were using the Details block to mim­ic the func­tion­al­i­ty of an Accor­dion element. 

Word­Press 6.9 now comes with an Accor­dion block, which is acces­si­ble and sup­ports nest­ed blocks.

2. Terms Query Block

This new block allows you to dis­play terms for a taxonomy. 

For exam­ple, it can be used to dis­play a list of cat­e­gories and tags (two default taxonomies).

3. Math Block

Cur­rent­ly, users need an exter­nal plu­g­in to write math equa­tions in Word­Press.

With Word­Press 6.9, this will be fixed with a Math block, which allows users to eas­i­ly write math equa­tions in the block edi­tor. This can be help­ful for edu­ca­tion­al blogs and online courses. 

4. Time to Read Block

The new Time to Read block will allow users to dis­play the time to read or the word count of an arti­cle. It can be added to indi­vid­ual posts or pages, or users can add it to their templates.

It’s a small touch that can make a big dif­fer­ence. When read­ers see how long a post will take to read, they’re more like­ly to click through and actu­al­ly fin­ish it.

Enhanced Design Options in Sev­er­al Blocks

Para­graph and head­ing blocks now have a “Fit text” for­mat­ting option. 

This fea­ture, also known as ‘Stretchy Type’, auto­mat­i­cal­ly scales your text to fill its con­tain­er, which is per­fect for hero sec­tions.

AI Developments in WordPress Core

Word­Press 6.9 will intro­duce the foun­da­tion for AI-pow­ered work­flows inside Word­Press Core. 

This effort is part of the new AI Build­ing Blocks for Word­Press ini­tia­tive, which includes the Abil­i­ties API, PHP AI Client SDK, MCP Adapter, and the AI Exper­i­ments Plugin.

What is the new Abilities API? 

Abil­i­ties API is a reg­istry of every­thing Word­Press can do in a machine-read­able format.

For years, Word­Press has offered thou­sands of func­tions through core soft­ware, plu­g­ins, and themes — but these were only acces­si­ble through code.

The Abil­i­ties API changes that by cre­at­ing a shared lan­guage that both humans and AI sys­tems can understand.

Each plu­g­in or theme can “reg­is­ter” what it’s capa­ble of — for exam­ple, ana­lyze SEO con­tent, gen­er­ate reports, or back up your site — along with clear inputs, out­puts, and permissions.

Here’s what makes this impor­tant: once abil­i­ties are reg­is­tered, AI tools can dis­cov­er and use them automatically. 

That means that an AI agent like Chat­G­PT or Claude could soon run Word­Press tasks such as opti­miz­ing posts, cre­at­ing pages, or trig­ger­ing plu­g­in actions — all safe­ly and securely.

Devel­op­ers can start exper­i­ment­ing with the Abil­i­ties API with Word­Press 6.9. There is already an MCP inte­gra­tion avail­able for WooCom­merce.

Command Palette Available Everywhere 

The Com­mand Palette in Word­Press is a huge time-saver. You can open it by press­ing Ctrl + K on Win­dows or Command + K on a Mac.

It pro­vides quick short­cuts for com­mon actions on your web­site, like cre­at­ing a new post or pre­view­ing a post in a new tab.

In Word­Press 6.9, it will be avail­able across the entire Word­Press dash­board, not just the Site Editor.

This lets you quick­ly search, jump to spe­cif­ic admin screens, or trig­ger actions from any­where, mak­ing nav­i­ga­tion much faster.

Performance and Speed Upgrades 

Word­Press 6.9 also deliv­ers major per­for­mance improve­ments for cre­at­ing a smoother, faster expe­ri­ence for your visitors.

Here are some of the key upgrades:

• Out­put Buffer­ing: A new “tem­plate enhance­ment out­put buffer” func­tion is intro­duced to improve per­for­mance. (#43258)
• Faster Load­ing for Clas­sic Themes: Block styles in clas­sic themes will now load “on demand,” which means your site won’t load CSS for blocks you aren’t using on a page. [#64099]
• Less Ren­der-Block­ing: The Emo­ji detec­tion script has been moved to the foot­er, help­ing your pages ren­der faster. [#64076]
• Improved Serv­er Per­for­mance: Cron jobs (sched­uled tasks) will now run at shut­down instead of dur­ing page load. This helps reduce the impact on your server’s response time (TTFB). (#63858)

Under the Hood Changes (for Developers) 

This release also brings sev­er­al oth­er pow­er­ful updates for developers.

• Improve­ments to the Inter­ac­tiv­i­ty API will pow­er client-side nav­i­ga­tion. This will enable cool new fea­tures in the future, like instant search or sub­mit­ting com­ments with­out a page reload. (#71603)
• The Block Bind­ing API has also been improved, allow­ing devel­op­ers to bind more con­tent, like image cap­tions, to cus­tom fields. 

Final­ly, it’s impor­tant to note that Word­Press 6.9 will not include a new default theme. The devel­op­ment team’s focus has been on improv­ing the edi­tor, APIs, and performance.

We hope this arti­cle helped you dis­cov­er what’s com­ing in Word­Press 6.9 and which new fea­tures you’d like to try out.

We are par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed about the col­lab­o­ra­tive Notes fea­ture and the abil­i­ty to hide blocks, which will stream­line con­tent workflows.

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The post What’s Com­ing in Word­Press 6.9? (Fea­tures and Screen­shots) first appeared on WPBe­gin­ner.