In the first major WordPress release of 2025, WordPress 6.8 released to the public on Tuesday, April 15. What’s new in WordPress 6.8? The new release is short on brand new features but has lots of refinements. We highlight the major changes here.
Speculative page loading
WordPress 6.8 introduces a new feature called speculative loading, which can allow pages to load almost instantly by loading URLs before the user visits them. The feature allows WordPress to set rules for which kind of URLs to prefetch or prerender. For example, if a user hovers over a link, the browser could trigger speculative loading and begin to load the page, and when the link is actually clicked, the page has already been loaded so it appears to load instantly. Speculative page loading will allow linked content to load much more quickly because the browser can effectively get a head start on loading page content.
Block editor changes
WordPress 6.8 brought some new features to the block editor:
- After editing an image (cropping, rotating, etc.), WordPress will provide an Undo link to revert the change
- A menu option to set any image block as the page’s featured image makes it quicker and easier to select a featured image
- A new Show Template toggle in the preview dropdown of the Post Editor’s top toolbar
- Several improvements to the Navigation block
Other new features
WordPress 6.8 also includes the following:
- The Style Book is now available to “classic” themes that don’t fully support the Gutenberg block editor
- The Styles panel in the full site editor now offers more control over global design settings like typography, colors, etc.
- Improvements for querying posts and pages — a new Query Total block, updates to the Query Loop block, etc.
- Improvements to password security
- Improvements to data views
WordPress 6.8 is now available, so update your site and see what you think of the new features and changes! For a complete list of new features and improvements, see the WordPress 6.8 Field Guide.
