In what has become an annual tradition for MPWR Design, we’re kicking off the new year with some new year’s resolutions we wish WordPress would make. You can compare this year’s list with our previous wish lists for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 to see how our ideas for the WordPress platform have changed over the years. With that in mind, here are what we consider to be the most notable features missing from WordPress or things we would like to see change:
1. Built-in SEO tools
WordPress by default is pretty good for SEO. If you use a “pretty” permalink structure that includes keywords from the title in your post (see our permalink explainer for help setting this up), your site title, permalink, and use of proper subheadings make your site decently easy for search engines to catalog and display. But you really need to use an SEO plugin to refine things like your meta description to make your site fully optimized for search. There’s no reason WordPress can’t offer built-in tools for this, and we believe WordPress would be much better off if it did.
2. Update scheduling
We’ve mentioned update scheduling for the past 3 years now, but it bears repeating once again. WordPress allows users to schedule content to go live, but you can’t schedule updates. Scheduling content is a powerful feature WordPress has had for years, enabling us to schedule our WordPress tips (like this one) to go live at a specific time. This way, they’re available before our first scheduled social media posts go live, and we don’t actually have to wait until Mondays to post content. There are plenty of reasons you might want to schedule changes to content too, whether it’s limited-time content (articles of the month, a temporary discount or sale, etc.) or simply keeping an article up to date when information is set to change. We use the PublishPress Revisions plugin, but the user experience is anything but smooth. Surely WordPress could do a better job implementing this feature, and it’s one they should strongly consider.
3. Dark mode support
In our 2023 list, we said, “It would be lazy to copy and paste from last year’s WordPress wish list, but it’s also starting to seem pretty lazy that WordPress still doesn’t have better support for dark mode.” Yet here we are in 2026 and nothing has changed.
WordPress is an amazing platform for building a website, and there are many reasons we use it and recommend it. However, as we have said for several years now, the way WordPress has handled dark mode is nothing short of embarrassing. WordPress core developers believe the best way to support dark mode is for individual themes to figure how to support it on their own, but that’s a terrible excuse, and it’s simply not true. The entire point of WordPress is to provide a common codebase for all themes and plugins so developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but they have failed in respect to dark mode.
As we have stated before, proper dark mode support requires three components:
- Dark mode options should be integrated into the Customizer so users can easily add a dark mode and light mode color for each element.
- WordPress needs to add dark mode alternatives to images — i.e. show image A in light mode and show image B in dark mode.
- WordPress needs to add dark mode support to the Dashboard so site admins can edit in dark mode.
These three components of dark mode all make much more sense to integrate into core rather than leaving the work to theme developers. Themes would have to determine which elements need to have colors selected as they do now, but the mechanism to do so would be much better integrated into core. We’ve actually made suggestions directly to the WordPress team on this issue, but sadly, the WordPress development team held strong to their position that theme developers should figure out a way to integrate dark mode on their own. We can only hope the WordPress team corrects course at some point.
4. Jetpack features built into core
Jetpack is a popular plugin that adds numerous basic features from WordPress.com — everything from downtime monitoring to site stats and spam blocking — to self-hosted sites. While some of the features are unnecessary, you can use the Jetpack plugin to turn each feature on or off to your liking. But if they’re built into WordPress.com sites, why not build them into WordPress core as well?
This is perhaps the most confusing aspect of WordPress: it means two separate things. WordPress itself is an open-source software package that anyone can download from the website WordPress.org and install on their own website. But a company called Automattic, which is heavily involved in the development of WordPress software, also owns the website WordPress.com and offers to host websites there. The two are not the same, and we’ve even written an explainer detailing the differences between the two WordPress offerings.
In a nutshell, Automattic takes the WordPress software and modifies it for WordPress.com sites. In doing so, they add these additional features, but they also require a paid plan to access some features that are free to self-hosted WordPress users. The latter is understandable. After all, they’re running a business and need to make it profitable. While it’s nice that they offer these features in the form of a plugin, wouldn’t it be nice if WordPress included these features by default instead?
The problem is Automattic doesn’t seem to want to build those features into WordPress core. The code is there, so all they’d have to do is move it from the plugin to core. While this would be a welcome change, the lack of desire on Automattic’s part makes it extremely unlikely. But we can still dream — after all, that’s what this article is for, right?
What features do you want to see WordPress add? Let us know in the comments!
