Earlier today, the WordPress development team released WordPress 6.8 “Cecil”, named after jazz artist Cecil Taylor.
WordPress 6.8, code-named “Cecil,” honors the legendary pianist and jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor.
Classically trained yet relentlessly unconventional, Taylor reimagined the piano as a percussive instrument—layering tone clusters, polyphony, and rhythm into a sound both chaotic and precise. His music defied expectation, finding form in disorder and harmony in dissonance.
That same spirit drives WordPress 6.8. Embrace its bold new features with the same curiosity and experimentation that defined Cecil’s sound.
New & updated stuff in WordPress 6.8 “Cecil”:
The Style Book gets a cleaner look—and a few new tricks.
The Style Book has a new, structured layout and clearer labels, to make it even easier to edit colors, typography—almost all your site styles—in one place.
Editor improvements
Easier ways to see your options in Data Views, and you can exclude sticky posts from the Query Loop. Plus, you’ll find lots of little improvements in the editor that smooth your way through everything you build.
Near-instant page loads, thanks to Speculative Loading
In WordPress 6.8, pages load faster than ever. When you or your user hovers over or clicks a link, WordPress may preload the next page, for a smoother, near-instant experience. The system balances speed and efficiency, and you can control how it works, with a plugin or your own code. This feature only works in modern browsers—older ones will simply ignore it without any impact.
Stronger password security with bcrypt
Now passwords are harder to crack with bcrypt hashing, which takes a lot more computing power to break. This strengthens overall security, as do other encryption improvements across WordPress. You don’t need to do anything—everything updates automatically.
PLUS:
- Accessibility improvements
- Performance updates
You can download this update via this link, or you can update your site via the WordPress Dashboard > Update.
NOTE: Before updating/upgrading your WordPress site, always make sure to create or have a backup of your database and other important files like the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file.
Just like with any major release, I will wait between two to three weeks for all the bugs to be ironed out before I install it on my live site.
Kudos to the WordPress dev team and all the contributors who helped make the release of WordPress 6.8 possible.
Have you already upgraded to WordPress 6.8 or waiting a while, just like me? What are your favorite new features? What do you like or dislike about this latest version? Did you encounter any issues or conflicts with your current theme or plugin? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
