The WordPress team has released its latest version, WordPress 6.8, on April 15, 2025. Continuing the tradition of naming releases after influential jazz musicians, this version is codenamed “Cecil,” in honor of the visionary American jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, known for his innovative and energetic improvisations.
Following the footsteps of WordPress 6.7 Rollins (celebrating the legendary saxophonist Sonny Rollins), WordPress 6.6 Dorsey (honoring the big band leader Tommy Dorsey), and WordPress 6.5 Regina (paying tribute to violinist Regina Carter), WordPress 6.8 Cecil brings a fresh set of enhancements focused on refining the creative process and improving user experience.
Here’s a look at some of the key features and improvements in WordPress 6.8 Cecil:
Streamlined Style Book: The Style Book, a valuable tool for block theme users, is now available in select Classic themes, offering a more unified design experience across different theme types.
Faster Navigation with Speculative Loading: Experience quicker transitions between pages thanks to speculative loading, which anticipates the pages you might visit next.
Enhanced Security with bcrypt Password Hashing: WordPress 6.8 implements the strong bcrypt algorithm for password hashing, providing a significant boost to user account security.
Accessibility Improvements: This release includes over 100 accessibility enhancements, making WordPress more inclusive and user-friendly for everyone.
Editor Upgrades: Expect thoughtful improvements to the block editor, contributing to a smoother and more intuitive content creation experience.
Performance Boosts: Under-the-hood optimisations continue to enhance the overall performance and speed of WordPress.
Updating WordPress 6.8
If you’re a client of our managed software updates service, you’ll have your site updated by one of our team shortly, alongside a proper manual check that the site is running OK afterwards. We’ll let you know if you need to update any plugins, themes, or bespoke code to work with the new version.
If you’re using an automatic update service, your site might have updated already or will do soon. Please check your site thoroughly to make sure that everything is still working OK; a version update like this might have a knock-on effect on plugins, themes, or bespoke code.
If you carry out updates yourself, be sure to read all the release notes and any information published by plugin/theme authors about knock-on effects. It’s recommended that you update your WordPress installation as soon as possible wherever your templates, plugins and any custom code allow. Take a backup and be sure that everything will be compatible before you update, and make sure that any custom code is transferred to your new installation where needed.
Pro WP hosting for WP pros
If you’re looking to supercharge your WordPress hosting, look at our feature-rich plans designed for hosting WP sites. Whether you’re a business owner or agency, there’s a plan for you.
In order to run WordPress 6.6, the following requirements are recommended:
- PHP 8.1 or higher
- MySQL 5.7 or higher, or MariaDB 10.1 or higher
- Nginx or Apache
WordPress 6.8 runs on PHP 7.4 but this version of PHP was discontinued in late 2022. Our advice is only run a website on a currently supported version of PHP but some older WordPress themes and plugins haven’t been updated to work with PHP 8.0 and above.
If you have any further questions regarding WordPress 6.8 Cecil then contact Enbecom today.