WordPress 6.6 “Dorsey”

Say hello to WordPress 6.6 “Dorsey,” named after the legendary American Big Band leader, Tommy Dorsey. Renowned for his smooth-toned trombone and compositions, Dorsey’s music captivated audiences with its emotional depth and vibrant energy.

Let your heart swing, sing, and sway to the deep brass notes of Dorsey’s Big Band sound as you explore the new features and enhancements of WordPress 6.6.

Hello, 6.6!

WordPress 6.6 delivers on the promise of a better web by bringing style, finesse, and a suite of creative possibilities to your site-building experience. This version helps you do more with ease, putting enhanced tools at your fingertips and giving you unprecedented power behind the scenes. You will find more ways to create beautiful, coherent design elements across your site, a new layout for quick page previews in the Site Editor, and the safety of automatic rollbacks for failed plugin auto-updates—among many other highlights.

In addition to the new features, “Dorsey” continues to deliver the performance and accessibility gains you can expect from every WordPress release. Explore what WordPress 6.6 has to offer and get ready to let its features take your sites to new heights.

Download WordPress 6.6 “Dorsey”

What’s inside

Add more design options to block themes

Create color or font sets to multiply design combinations across one theme. These sets offer more contained design possibilities, allowing visual variety within the site’s broader styling guidelines.

Simplify your workflow with a new layout for pages in the Site Editor

See all of your pages and a preview of any selected page with the new side-by-side layout in the Site Editor.

Auto-update your plugins with peace of mind

Enjoy the convenience of plugin auto-updates with the safety of rollbacks if anything goes wrong—offering your site a new level of security, enhanced functionality as it becomes available, and almost no time or bandwidth from you to make it happen.

Customize content in synced patterns

Make content changes in each instance of a synced pattern while maintaining a consistent style across them. Set these overrides for Heading, Paragraph, Button, and Image blocks when placed in a synced pattern.

Performance

WordPress 6.6 features important updates like removing redundant WP_Theme_JSON calls, disabling autoload for large options, and eliminating unnecessary polyfill dependencies. Other highlights include lazy-loading post embeds, a new data-wp-on-async directive, and templates in the editor that load approximately 35% faster overall.

Accessibility

This release includes 58 accessibility fixes and enhancements. These focus on foundational aspects of the WordPress experience, particularly the data views component powering the new site editing experience and areas like the Inserter, which provide a key way of interacting with blocks and patterns.

And much more

Visit the feature showcase for a full overview of all the new features and enhancements in WordPress 6.6.

Check out what’s new

Learn more about WordPress 6.6

Explore Learn WordPress for quick how-to videos, online workshops, and other free resources to level up your WordPress knowledge and skills.

The WordPress 6.6 Field Guide contains detailed technical information and developer notes to help you build with WordPress and get the most out of this release. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Developer Blog for updates, tutorials, and other helpful WordPress content for developers.

For information about installation, file changes, fixes, and other updates, read the 6.6 release notes.

The 6.6 release squad

Every release comes to you from a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors who help keep things on track and moving smoothly. The team that has led 6.6 is a cross-functional group of contributors who are always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues.

Release Lead: Matt Mullenweg
Release Coordinator: Meher Bala
Core Tech Lead: Jb Audras
Editor Tech Leads: Ella van Durpe, Vicente Canales
Core Triage Leads: Olga Gleckler, Nazmul Hasan Robin
Editor Triage Leads: Fabian Kägy, Damon Cook
Documentation Leads: JuanMa Garrido, Jenny Dupuy, Josep Morán
Marketing & Communications Lead: Mary Baum
Test Lead: Anne McCarthy
Design Lead: Rich Tabor
Performance Lead: Adam Silverstein

Thank you, contributors

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing and embody the freedoms that come with open source. A global and diverse community of people collaborating to strengthen the software supports this effort.

WordPress 6.6 reflects the tireless efforts and passion of more than 630 contributors in at least 51 countries. This release also welcomed over 150 first-time contributors!

Their collaboration delivered more than 1,900 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all—a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community.

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More than 60 locales have translated 90 percent or more of WordPress 6.6 into their language. Community translators are working hard to ensure more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress available in 200 languages.

Last but not least, thanks to the volunteers who contribute to the support forums by answering questions from WordPress users worldwide.

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