What’s New with WordPress 7.1

WordPress 7.1, released August 19, 2026, is named “Mary Lou” in honor of legendary jazz pianist, composer, and arranger Mary Lou Williams. WordPress has a long-standing tradition of naming its major releases after influential jazz musicians. Major WordPress updates typically arrive two or three times a year, bringing a combination of new features, improvements, bug fixes, and behind-the-scenes changes. So, what’s new in WordPress 7.1, and which changes are actually worth knowing about? Let’s take a look.

Here are 3 areas that WordPress 7.1 improved:

1)  Improvements for All WordPress Users

Here are some of the improvements in WordPress 7.1 that apply to all WordPress users, no matter which editor or theme you are using.

• Infinite Scrolling in the Media Library: As you scroll through your images, WordPress automatically loads more instead of making you click “Load more.” If you prefer the old way, you can turn infinite scrolling off in your user profile.
• Better Support for iPhone Photos: WordPress 7.1 makes it easier to upload HEIC photos, a format commonly used by iPhones, by processing them in your browser and converting them to a web-friendly format when needed.
• More Reliable Image Uploads: WordPress has improved the way images are uploaded and processed, which can mean fewer problems with large images or when your internet connection is interrupted.
• The WordPress Admin Toolbar Is More Consistent: The familiar toolbar at the top of your screen now stays available in more places, making it easier to navigate around WordPress.
• Accessibility Improvements: WordPress continues to make improvements that make the WordPress Dashboard and websites easier to use for people with disabilities.

2)  What’s New in the Block Editor

These new features apply to you if you’re using the WordPress Block Editor, also known as Gutenberg. If you’re using the Classic Editor, Elementor, or another WordPress page editor, these changes generally won’t apply to you.

• New Image Editor: WordPress has improved the image-editing experience, making it easier to crop, rotate, flip, and adjust images in one dedicated editing window.
• New Tabs Block: You can organize information into clickable tabs without needing to install a separate plugin.
• New Playlist Block: You can create an audio playlist with multiple tracks, artwork, and other information.
• Better Mobile and Tablet Styling: You can adjust how supported blocks look on desktop computers, tablets, and phones directly in the editor, including things such as font size and spacing, without having to write custom CSS.
• Better Mobile and Tablet Previews: You can preview your content at different screen sizes while you’re editing, making it easier to see how it will look on different devices.
• Hover and Interaction Styling: You have more control over how certain blocks look when someone hovers over or interacts with them. This is especially helpful for buttons because you can have a button change color when someone hovers over it.
• Improved Notes: WordPress has improved Notes, which let you add comments and feedback to specific text within your content. You can @mention another WordPress user, and Notes can include formatting and links, making them more useful when collaborating with other people on your website.
• Gallery Improvements: WordPress has made it easier to work with galleries and images associated with a post, including improvements to finding images attached to the current post.
• Improved Cover Block Image Editing: There are additional improvements for editing images used in Cover blocks.
• Mark Images as Decorative: The Image block now lets you mark an image as decorative. This tells screen readers to skip an image that is there purely for visual decoration, helping make your content more accessible to people with visual disabilities.
• Improved Command Palette: The Command Palette is a shortcut tool that lets you search for things you want to do in WordPress instead of finding them through menus. In WordPress 7.1, the results are better organized, making it easier to quickly find the command or action you need.

Full Site Editing and Block Theme Improvements

“Full Site Editing” is a way of designing your entire WordPress website using blocks. With a block theme, you can use the Site Editor to change not only the content of your pages and posts, but also parts of your overall website design, such as the header, footer, navigation menus, and templates. With a classic theme, these areas are usually controlled through the theme’s settings, the Customizer, widgets, or Appearance → Menus instead. In simple terms, Full Site Editing extends the block system beyond pages and posts so you can use blocks to design your entire website.

These changes are particularly relevant if you’re using a block theme and the Site Editor.

• Navigation Block Improvements: WordPress 7.1 includes improvements to the Navigation block, which is used to create and manage menus in block themes. These changes make working with menus smoother. If you use a classic theme and manage your menus through Appearance → Menus, these changes generally won’t affect you.
• More Background Design Options: Supported blocks can use a gradient together with a background image, giving you more design possibilities.
• More Layout Controls: Supported blocks have additional sizing controls, such as minimum width, giving you more flexibility when creating layouts.

3) Behind-the-Scenes Improvements

WordPress 7.1 also includes many technical improvements behind the scenes. You may not notice these changes directly, but they are designed to improve performance, reliability, and efficiency, helping WordPress run more smoothly.

WordPress 7.1 also includes more than 180 Core bug fixes, addressing many smaller issues to make WordPress more stable and reliable.

(AI image disclosure: The depiction of Mary Lou Williams in this graphic was created with AI and is not an authentic historical photograph)