A few times a year, the WordPress open source software gets a major update, providing users with new capabilities, regular refinements, and important bug fixes. With hundreds of fixes and enhancements, WordPress 6.6 brings a new level of creativity, usability, and efficiency to your WordPressing.
Here’s a quick tour of what this latest update offers folks on WordPress.com, starting with some of the basics about WordPress 6.6.
Table of Contents
- The basics
- More efficient views and navigation in the Site Editor
- Unified and updated publishing flow
- Override synced patterns with custom content
- Automatic plugin rollbacks
- New design elements
- Section-specific styles
- Block Bindings API upgrades
- And more!
The basics
WordPress 6.6 is available right now and has likely already landed on your WordPress.com site. You may notice that many of these new features have been available on your site(s) for a few weeks or even months; we often roll out updates in waves on WordPress.com to allow for early access, testing, and iteration before these major updates are more widely released.
Sites on WordPress.com are updated automatically. If you run into issues or bugs, always feel free to reach out to our expert Happiness Engineers at wordpress.com/help.
More efficient views and navigation in the Site Editor
The last couple major WordPress releases have dramatically reimagined the Site Editor experience. With 6.6 you’ll see a new side-by-side default layout when viewing and editing pages.
Pattern management has also been better integrated, ensuring more efficient navigation and fewer clicks to get where you want to be.
Amidst these bigger changes are a number of small enhancements to keyboard navigation, bulk editing actions, and the overall design and functionality of the Site Editor.
Unified and updated publishing flow
If you’ve spent time in the Site Editor, you’ll have noticed that it used to offer a fairly different experience from the page/post editor. WordPress 6.6 now offers a shared workflow for publishing, leading to smoother interactions when navigating between various elements of your site.
As part of this unification, there’s also an update to the layout and design of the publish flow with more prominent displays for the title, publishing status, and featured image.
For all the plugin and theme developers out there, this particular update also makes it easier to extend the editor. Both the post/page editor and Site Editor now use the same slots and extensibility APIs.
For users, this means a lot more plugins will be able to bring exciting features into the editor. For plugin developers, it means that it’s easier to implement your code to extend the editor’s capabilities.
Override synced patterns with custom content
This new feature allows for editing specific blocks even when you’re utilizing synced patterns and styles. For example, if you have a pattern for a stylized button CTA, you can use this override feature to use different copy or even colors for different pages and button locations, while maintaining common elements.
You can “Enable Overrides” from the “Advanced” section of the Paragraph, Heading, Buttons, and Image blocks, with more block support planned for the future.
Automatic plugin rollbacks
When it comes to plugin management, WordPress.com offers unparalleled reliability and redundancy. In addition to the scheduled plugin updates that we recently introduced, WordPress core now offers automatic rollbacks when a plugin update fails.
If you don’t utilize scheduled updates, your plugins will update automatically when new versions become available.
In the past, if a plugin update failed, WordPress would leave the plugin inactive, which might render some parts of your website unusable or broken. In WordPress 6.6, the plugin is rolled back to the previous version, ensuring continuity with your site until you can diagnose and fix the issue.
New design elements
WordPress 6.6 offers a handful of new customization options for designing and stylizing your site. Let’s explore the most impactful new features.
Site background image
Make an immediate visual splash with the new site-wide background image option in the Site Editor. Whether it’s a striking full-bleed photo or a whimsical graphic pattern, you have the freedom to choose size, position, and repetition.
Negative margins
You can now set negative margins for any block, allowing for more granular margin control. This enables users to more easily create overlapping design elements. Note that negative values must be entered manually rather than with the slider.
All-new grid support
With the Grid and Grid Layout blocks, you can quickly create professional-looking grids for your images, testimonials, videos, and more. The “Auto” option automatically generates mobile-responsive rows and columns while the “Manual” option provides more granular control.
Custom default shadow styles
From the Styles menu, you can now edit shadow effects, including changing the default shadow style for images, buttons, and more. You can also add your own shadow styles, giving your total control over this subtle and powerful design element.
Section-specific styles
Here’s one for the theme builders out there. With WordPress 6.6, you have the option to define style variations for specific sections of a site, not just the theme as a whole. To enable this, you’ll have to edit your theme’s theme.json file and declare the style variation (click here for instructions). Once that’s set up, you will be able to quickly modify the styles of several blocks for areas like headers, footers, content sections, and more.
As a bonus, section styles also work flawlessly with content imported from our public pattern collection.
Block Bindings API upgrades
This release makes Block Bindings easier to use and more powerful. Originally available since WordPress 6.5, this feature allows users to connect (or “bind”) the content of a block to the data of a custom field. Here’s how to create that in a post. WordPress 6.6 takes it one step further by enabling the option to edit custom field data by just updating the block in the editor.
And more!
There are hundreds of updates to WordPress in the 6.6 release. What we’ve highlighted above is a just taste of the most notable and visible features. If you’re a developer and want to look under the hood a bit more, you can find the full slate of goodies in this WordPress 6.6 Field Guide.
Click below if you’re a developer and want to leverage the benefits of hosting your sites with WordPress.com:
*Photo and video credit: WordPress.org
WordPress.com News 
I have yet to try 6.6. Notifications have been a bit wonky this past week, but working better today.
Welcome WordPress 6.6, already a happy user of it!
Your tips are so helpful. Can be get back the zoom feature for the images. Thanks!
Adding grid blocks is a fantastic addition!
Thank you for applications.
Exciting new features in this update
Was interesting to see it pop up on my google news feed. Took a picture of it and sent it to Ian, he was surprised I saw it that quickly because it had just been released about an hour before I saw it.
Even got the 6.6.1 notice just as quickly.
Excited to try and see these new features.
A lot of great information on this page. I’ve recently reconstructed the Twenty Twenty Three Theme into a more modular theme than what it already was. I now have parts of my website that are 2 columns, and others that are 3 columns, all done with group and column blocks. I tried the new site background image feature, and found that it doesn’t really work too well. For tiling, the image is made extremely small (I couldn’t find a setting to adjust it), and the other options stretch an image, or places an image across the entire screen, but does not remain fixed in place, and leaves a gray area when you scroll a page. Maybe there will be more updates in the future to fix all of that. I have discovered that you can achieve a site background image with the Cover block. That block has a fixed image setting which looks pretty decent. The only thing with that is you have to move all of your template parts into the Cover block which kind of isn’t a big deal but is a little more complicated than this new built in background image feature. Now I gotta play around with the Grid block and see what I can create with it.