WordPress 6.8 Beta is now available. This is the first beta released as part of the 6.8 development cycle and can be deployed to non-production environments in your WordPress VIP dashboard.

The current target for the final release is April 15, 2025

What is being added or changed?

WordPress 6.8 Beta 1 contains over 370 enhancements and 520 bug fixes for the editor, including design improvements, polishing the query loop, and more than 230 tickets for WordPress 6.8 Core. Here’s a glimpse of what’s coming:

Editor improvements

Easier ways to see your options in Data Views, and you can opt to ignore sticky posts in the Query Loop. Plus you’ll find lots of little improvements in the editor!

The Style Book comes to Classic themes

The Style Book now features a structured layout so you can preview site colors, typography, and block styles more easily. You can use the Style Book in classic themes with editor-styles or a theme.json file and includes clearer labels, and you can find them under Appearance > Design.

Support for Speculation browser API

WordPress 6.8 introduces native support for speculative loading, leveraging the Speculation Rules API to improve site performance with near-instant page loads. This feature prefetches or prerenders URLs based on user interactions, such as hovering over links, reducing load times for subsequent pages.

Major security boost

WordPress 6.8 will use bcrypt for password hashing, which significantly hardens WordPress. Other hashing is getting hardened, too, throughout the security apparatus. You won’t have to change anything in your daily workflow.

How to test the upgrade on a local environment

The quickest way to test locally is to use the VIP Local Development Environment.

To update an existing environment:

vip dev-env update -w=6.8 --slug=mytestsite

To create a new one:

vip dev-env create -w=6.8 --slug=mytestsite

How to test the upgrade on a VIP Platform environment

You can update your non-production environments by running the trunk version of WordPress from within the Software Management section of the VIP Dashboard or by running the vip config software update command with VIP-CLI.

For example:

vip @mytestsite.production config software update wordpress trunk