WordPress 7.1 is now in the Release Candidate phase, so it will be available soon. As with every version, it comes with an extensive list of changes: more than 310 core tickets, 180 bug fixes, and nearly 600 additional improvements coming from Gutenberg.
Let’s focus on the essentials; in this article, I will highlight the most relevant changes for your daily use.
Images are now processed in your browser
This is probably the most useful day-to-day change.
Until now, when you uploaded an 8 MB photo taken directly from your phone, that entire photo traveled to your server, where WordPress would then resize, compress, and generate the six or seven versions it requires.
In 7.1, that work is handled in the browser, before anything is uploaded. What are the benefits?
- It reduces the server workload.
- Images with uncommon formats simply work (for example, a HEIC photo taken from an iPhone).
- Modern compression formats like AVIF work without needing server-side support.
For now, it doesn’t fundamentally solve the issue of uploading an 8 MB photo that takes up unnecessary server space if it won’t be used, but all in good time… a plugin or a core update will eventually address that.
The Media Library: infinite scroll by default
The media library grid view now loads content as you scroll down, instead of using pagination. It sounds like a minor detail, but it changes how you search for an old image among thousands of files.
It is optional per user. If someone on your team prefers the traditional pagination, they can restore it from their profile options.
The admin bar no longer disappears
Until now, entering the Site Editor or the Block Editor was like stepping through a door into a happy, magical new world—but one where few people knew they had to click the top left to exit.
In 7.1, the admin bar stays with you as you move between the public site, the dashboard, the Site Editor, and the Block Editor.
The editor is now always contained within an iframe
WordPress has been moving the editor into an iframe (an isolated document within the page) for several versions. In 7.1, the transition is complete.
With this change, any plugin that modifies the editor “from the outside”—typically using JavaScript or CSS that assumed everything lived in the same document—may stop working as expected. If your website has custom development or editor-related plugins that haven’t been updated in a while, you should test 7.1 in a staging environment first.
Along the same lines of “test first”: jQuery UI is being updated to version 1.14.2 from 1.13.3. If you have legacy plugins that depend on certain jQuery UI functionalities, this is another thing to check.
Design: responsive styles and :hover states
Global Styles gain three features that block-based designers have been requesting for a long time:
- Style variations based on screen size, with configurable breakpoints. This means being able to specify “this block looks like this on mobile” without writing manual CSS in a separate plugin.
- Interaction states (the classic color change on hover, keyboard focus, etc.) are now configurable from the style system itself.
Blocks also debut support for background gradients and minimum width; the Custom HTML block allows you to continue editing the blocks it contains; and the Query Loop block finally has an option to exclude the current post (useful for typical “related articles” sections where the post you were already reading used to appear).
Accessibility: 46 tickets
Tables of contents are now more understandable for screen readers, dashboard contrast has been improved, the WordPress installation process is more accessible, and a unified system of accessible tooltips has been introduced, which plugin creators will appreciate.
The Abilities API continues to grow (or: WordPress preparing for AI)
This is the most technical and interesting part in the medium term. The Abilities API, which arrived in 6.9, is a standardized registry of “things this site knows how to do” so that an external program (usually an AI agent) can query and execute them in a controlled manner.
In 7.1, this simply continues to advance with new functions.
And for the future
There are a few things that haven’t made it into this version yet.
- Real-time collaborative editing (multiple people editing a post at once, Google Docs style) has been tested extensively during the cycle, but it will not be enabled yet. It’s still in the works.
- The Classic block is staying. There was a proposal to hide it from the inserter, which was tested and then reversed.
- React 19 has been postponed to a future version and continues as an experiment in the Gutenberg plugin.
- Multilingual 😀
Should we update?
Yes, I recommend this order:
- Backup.
- Staging, if you think there is something that might cause issues. Above all, test changes in the editor.
- If everything looks good, move to production.
We will be testing 7.1 on the WordPress sites we maintain over the coming weeks. If you find anything unusual after updating (or if you prefer that we look into it before anything unusual happens), contact us and we’ll take a look.
Source: WordPress 7.1 Field Guide, on Make WordPress Core.