WordPress 7.1 was released on August 19th, coinciding with the final day of WordCamp US.
It follows swiftly on the heals of 7.0 which came out in May and was a pretty high impact release. 7.1 builds on that by refining it, and by introducing a lot of things people have been asking for since the block editor first arrived.
What’s New in WordPress 7.1?
As always, in these posts, we cover the standout changes of the release, so this is a highlight summary rather than an exhaustive deep dive.
The WordPress 7.1 Field Guide gives you a good idea of the work that went into this release:
- over 100 enhancements and feature request.
- over 180 bug fixes.
- 46 accessibility focused tickets.
- 40 UI-focused tickets.
- 28 admin focused tickets.
For Gutenberg, 7.1 includes:
- over 600 enhancements.
- over 630 bug fixes.
As per usual, these updates are a huge team effort, worked on by hundreds of contributors across the globe. It’s impressive to see how much the community gets through release after release.
Performance
This isn’t a big performance improvement heavy release like many others have been, but there are a few changes worth knowing about that help to reduce load in the right places.
- Media processing (cropping, rotation, format conversion) now happens client-side in the browser, rather than the server.
- Uploads are more resilient, with automatic retires if a connection drops, rather than failing outright and needing a re-upload.
- The Media Library grid now scrolls infinitely, instead of leading everything in one go, which is a smoother experience on media heavy sites.
If Core Web Vitals and page speed are your main interest, 7.1 is a quieter release for you, with the bulk of the work in this cycle going to the editor and admin experience.
Usability & Accessibility
With 46 accessibility focused tickets in this release, WordPress continues its commitment to a more accessible web. Highlights include:
- A new accessible tooltips API, bringing consistent names and informational tooltips to areas of wp-admin that didn’t have them before.
- Improved screen reader predictability, including a new ‘Mark as decorative’ toggle on the image block, to hide purely decorative images from assistive technology.
- Fixes focus traps, focus rings in high contrast mode, and better help text associations across form controls.
On the day-to-day usability side, a few small but overdue changes are:
- The admin toolbar now follows you into the site editor and block editor (nicknamed the ‘omnibar’ by the core team).
- The command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + K) now groups results into recent, matching results, and suggestions, and remembers what you’ve used recently.
- You can finally reassign a misthreaded comment to a different parent directly from the edit comment screen, no database editing required.
- Sire title. tagline and icon now live in a dedicated identity section instead of being scattered across settings.
Site Editing & Blocks
This is where the bulk of the release lives. The headline feature is responsive and hover styling, without writing CSS:
- You can now set different block styles per screen size (desktop, tablet, mobile) directly in the editor, both globally through style variations and per individual block.
- Interactive states, hover, focus and active, are now standard style controls too. Changing a button’s colour on hover no longer means custom CSS or a page builder plugin.
Beyond that:
- Two new core blocks – Playlist (bundles audio files into a single player with a waveform view) and Tabs (clickable content panels), both jobs that previously needed a plugin.
- Background gradients and background images no longer fight each other across Group, Verse, Accordion, Pull Quote, Post Content, and Quote Blocks.
- The Notes feature (introduced in 6.9) has improves, with inline formatting, @mentions with email notifications, notes on a specific text selection rather than a whole block, and shareable revision links so you can send a colleague a specific draft to review.
- The Classic block isn’t going anywhere. A plan to hide it from the inserter was reversed on July 7th, so if you still use it, nothing changes.
Real-time collaborative editing is still not part of Core. It’s had another full cycle of testing behind the scenes, but the Field Guide is explicit that it is still isn’t included.
Developer-Friendly Updates
7.1 also brings a solid set of under the hood changes:
- The post editor now always runs inside an iframe. This is what makes the new responsive and hover controls possible, but it means blocks still built on Block API version 2 or lower will need updating to version 3 to display correctly.
- The Abilities API (introduced in 7.0) gains custom validation hooks, richer user information, and more consistent schemas.
- A new SVG Icon API lets plugin and theme authors register custom icons for use throughout the editor.
- The Connectors screen (also from 7.0) adds usernames and application password authentication alongside API keys.
- jQuery UI moves to version 1.14.2, a dependency jump worth checking if any of your plugins lean on jQuery UI widgets.
- 20 new hooks are introduced in total, including 19 filters and 1 action,
To explore the full list of changes, check out the official release notes and the 7.1 Field Guide.
For our clients, your websites will be updated to 7.1 shortly. They will of course be fully tested on the staging version of your website, to ensure there are no issues or conflicts before updating the live site.
If you’d like to learn more about our WordPress & WooCommerce Support & Maintenance plans, drop us an email or give James a call.
Our plans provide a holistic solution to your website’s performance, reliability and security, and are inclusive of premium tools and services.
