Word­Press 6.9 is final­ly here 🥳, and it marks the final major release of 2025. After months of fol­low­ing the devel­op­ment, we are excit­ed to see this update go live.

This release focus­es heav­i­ly on improv­ing your work­flow. You’ll find new ways to col­lab­o­rate with your team, clean­er ways to draft con­tent, and native blocks that replace the need for extra plugins.

We’ve explored all the new fea­tures, and in this guide, we’ll walk you through what’s new in Word­Press 6.9 with screen­shots and tips on how to use them.

Here is a quick overview of the changes in Word­Press 6.9:

• Col­lab­o­rate with Block-Lev­el “Notes” 💬
• Hide Blocks on the Front End (Block Visibility)
• A Smoother Drag and Drop Experience
• New Blocks to Bet­ter Orga­nize Content
• Improved Email Han­dling and Inline Images
• Com­mand Palette Avail­able Every­where ⌨️
• AI Devel­op­ments in Word­Press 6.9
• Per­for­mance and Speed Upgrades 🚀
• Oth­er Devel­op­er Changes:

Collaborate with Block-Level “Notes” 💬

Word­Press 6.9 is tak­ing a big step toward bet­ter team col­lab­o­ra­tion. The new “Notes” fea­ture lets you attach com­ments direct­ly to indi­vid­ual blocks, just like in Google Docs.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, you had to use Slack or third-par­ty plu­g­ins to dis­cuss edits. Now, you can sim­ply click the three-dot menu on any block and select ‘Add note’ to leave feedback.

Your team mem­bers can reply to notes, tag oth­ers, and resolve the thread once the changes are made.

You can also view a list of all notes on a page by click­ing the Notes but­ton in the top toolbar.

This is a huge improve­ment for edi­to­r­i­al work­flows. Best of all, these notes are pri­vate to the edi­tor and will nev­er be seen by your web­site visitors.

Hide Blocks on the Front End (Block Visibility) 

Have you ever want­ed to draft a sec­tion of a page but not show it to the pub­lic yet? In the past, you need­ed a plu­g­in for this.

Word­Press 6.9 adds a native Hide on Fron­tend option. This lets you keep blocks in your edi­tor while mak­ing them invis­i­ble to visitors.

To use it, just click the three-dot menu on a block and select ‘Hide’.

The block will van­ish from the visu­al can­vas, but you can still find it using the Doc­u­ment Overview (List View). 

From there, you can tog­gle vis­i­bil­i­ty back on when­ev­er you are ready to publish.

This is per­fect for prepar­ing sea­son­al con­tent (like Black Fri­day ban­ners) in advance or draft­ing updates with­out cre­at­ing a whole new page.

A Smoother Drag and Drop Experience 

For many begin­ners, mov­ing blocks around the edi­tor used to feel a bit clunky. You had to grab a spe­cif­ic “han­dle” to move things.

Word­Press 6.9 intro­duces Direct Drag and Drop. You can now click and drag blocks more intu­itive­ly with­in the edi­tor with­out need­ing to find the small drag handle.

This makes the Block Edi­tor feel much more like a true visu­al page builder, sig­nif­i­cant­ly speed­ing up your design process.

New Blocks to Better Organize Content 

This release elim­i­nates the need for sev­er­al com­mon plu­g­ins by adding new, pow­er­ful blocks to the core library.

1. The Accor­dion Block

You can final­ly cre­ate col­lapsi­ble con­tent sec­tions native­ly. The new Accor­dion block allows you to add mul­ti­ple text pan­els that expand and collapse.

Pro Tip: The Accor­dion block sup­ports Anchors. This means you can cre­ate direct links to spe­cif­ic ques­tions inside your FAQ sec­tion, which is great for SEO and the user experience.

2. Terms Query Block

This block lets you dis­play a dynam­ic list of cat­e­gories or tags any­where on your site. 

It is high­ly cus­tomiz­able and updates auto­mat­i­cal­ly as you add new content.

3. Math Block

Do you run an edu­ca­tion­al site? You no longer need an extra plu­g­in to write math equa­tions.

The new Math block sup­ports LaTeX and MathML stan­dards out of the box.

4. Time to Read Block

This small but use­ful block cal­cu­lates and dis­plays the esti­mat­ed read­ing time of your post. 

Adding this to the top of your arti­cles can encour­age vis­i­tors to start reading.

5. Bet­ter Typog­ra­phy with “Fit Text”

A new “Fit text” option is avail­able for para­graphs and head­ings. It auto­mat­i­cal­ly scales your text to fill the con­tain­er size. 

This is fan­tas­tic for cre­at­ing bold, respon­sive hero sec­tions that look good on all screen sizes.

Improved Email Handling and Inline Images 

This is a “behind-the-scenes” update that will help Word­Press devel­op­ers and users who want to cus­tomize Word­Press emails. Word­Press 6.9 has improved the way it sends emails (via the wp_mail function).

The sys­tem now sup­ports inline images. This means that emails sent by WordPress—like pass­word resets, new user noti­fi­ca­tions, or receipts—can now include images direct­ly in the mes­sage body.

This improves usabil­i­ty and ensures your emails look pro­fes­sion­al, rather than show­ing bro­ken image icons in your sub­scribers’ inboxes.

Command Palette Available Everywhere ⌨️

The Com­mand Palette is a pow­er-user tool that lets you quick­ly jump to dif­fer­ent parts of your site by press­ing Ctrl + K (or Command + K on Mac).

In Word­Press 6.9, this fea­ture is now avail­able across the entire Word­Press dash­board, not just the Site Editor.

You can use it to instant­ly search for a spe­cif­ic set­ting, jump to the Plu­g­ins page, or cre­ate a new post with­out click­ing through mul­ti­ple menus.

AI Developments in WordPress 6.9

Word­Press 6.9 brings sig­nif­i­cant AI updates. Here is a sum­ma­ry of those updates:

1. Abilities API 

The all-new 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 pro­vides a shared lan­guage that both humans and AI plat­forms 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.

2. MCP Adapter 

Think of the MCP Adapter as a bridge. It con­nects the Word­Press Abil­i­ties API with the MCP spec­i­fi­ca­tion, giv­ing AI agents a stan­dard­ized way to “talk” to your website.

This tool includes sup­port for stan­dard con­nec­tions (like HTTP and STDIO) and comes with built-in error han­dling. This makes it much eas­i­er for devel­op­ers to build cus­tom AI inte­gra­tions that are both flex­i­ble and reliable.

3. PHP AI Client

The new PHP AI Client makes it much eas­i­er for devel­op­ers to add AI fea­tures to their plugins.

It works with all major AI providers, giv­ing devel­op­ers the free­dom to choose the exact mod­el they need. Best of all, it man­ages your cre­den­tials cen­tral­ly, so you don’t have to enter your API keys sep­a­rate­ly for every plugin.

Performance and Speed Upgrades 🚀

As with every major release, Word­Press 6.9 is faster. The core team has made sev­er­al changes to improve page load times for visitors:

• Smarter Style Load­ing: For “Clas­sic Themes,” Word­Press now only loads the CSS for the blocks you are actu­al­ly using on the page, rather than load­ing every­thing at once. [#64099]
• Less Ren­der Block­ing: Scripts for things like emo­jis have been moved to the foot­er, which helps the vis­i­ble part of your web­site appear faster (improv­ing your LCP score). [#64076]
• Opti­mized Back­ground Tasks: Sched­uled tasks (Cron jobs) now run at shut­down, so they don’t slow down the page load for your vis­i­tors. (#63858)

Other Developer Changes: 

• Block Bind­ings API UI: The inter­face for con­nect­ing block attrib­ut­es to cus­tom fields has been improved, allow­ing you to bind or unbind data with a sin­gle click.
• PHP 8.5 Sup­port: Word­Press 6.9 adds beta sup­port for PHP 8.5, ensur­ing com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with the lat­est serv­er environments.

We hope this arti­cle helped you dis­cov­er what’s new in Word­Press 6.9. We are par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed about the Notes fea­ture for col­lab­o­ra­tion and the improve­ments to email reliability.

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