WordPress 7.1 enters release candidate testing this week

WordPress 7.1 moved into its release candidate phase on August 5, 2026. That date matters more than most points on the release calendar, because it marks feature freeze. Whatever shipped in Release Candidate 1 is what you’ll get when WordPress 7.1 becomes the default download on August 19. If you run a WordPress site, this is the week to test your plugins and theme against it, not the week after launch.

What’s actually new in WordPress 7.1

WordPress 7.1 is a “finish what we started” release. It builds on the AI and collaboration work from WordPress 7.0 rather than chasing a new headline feature, and most of the changes land in three areas: styling, media, and the admin experience.

Styling controls that skip custom CSS

You can now style hover, focus, and active states directly from the block editor, no CSS required. WordPress 7.1 also lets you set different block styles for different screen sizes without writing a single media query. Theme authors can define their own breakpoints in theme.json, so responsive controls follow each theme’s own design instead of a generic default.

A media workflow that gets out of your way

Image and media processing now happens in the browser before upload. WordPress 7.1 adds native support for HEIC, the format iPhones save photos in by default, along with AVIF, UltraHDR, and WebP, plus GIF-to-video conversion for lighter files. Uploads get a visible progress indicator and retry automatically if your connection drops. A new Media Editor Modal replaces the old inline cropping tool, bringing cropping, rotation, and metadata editing into one place.

A calmer, more consistent admin

The admin toolbar now follows you into the Site Editor and Block Editor instead of vanishing the moment you start editing. The command palette, opened with Ctrl or Cmd+K, groups results into recent, matching, and suggested sections instead of one long list. Two new blocks arrive too: a Tabs block for organizing content into clickable panels, and a Playlist block with a waveform visualization for audio and podcast content.

What this means if you run a WordPress site

The most consequential change for developers sits underneath all the visible features. WordPress 7.1 enforces the iframed editor for every post, which isolates the editing canvas from your admin styles. Blocks built on Block API v2 or lower need updating to v3 to stay compatible, so if you maintain a custom theme or plugin, check your block registrations now while there’s still time before August 19. We covered the groundwork for these changes when WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 first landed, and the release candidate confirms most of what that beta previewed.

Site owners without a dev background have less to worry about, but it’s still worth running your site through a staging environment before the final release. Pair that testing with a look at how your pages perform for both visitors and crawlers. We wrote about how Google’s Lighthouse tool now grades sites for AI agent readiness, which is a useful companion check alongside a WordPress upgrade, since a cleaner build tends to score better on both fronts. A well-organized site also helps in a different way: it’s what gets your business found by AI chatbots in the first place, and WordPress 7.1’s structural changes to blocks and media make that kind of clean markup easier to maintain.

The full list of what shipped is documented in the official WordPress 7.1 Beta 1 announcement, and you can track the remaining milestones, including RC2 on August 12, on the WordPress 7.1 release schedule published by the Core team.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does WordPress 7.1 come out?

WordPress 7.1 has an official release date of August 19, 2026. Release Candidate 1 shipped on August 5, marking feature freeze, and RC2 follows on August 12 before the final release.

What does it mean that WordPress 7.1 is in release candidate?

A release candidate is a near-final build. No new features get added after RC1, so the team spends the remaining weeks fixing bugs rather than building anything new. It’s a good time to test the update on a staging site, since the final release will match this build closely.

Do I need to do anything before WordPress 7.1 launches?

If you maintain a custom theme or plugin, check that your blocks use Block API v3, since the enforced iframed editor in WordPress 7.1 requires it. Everyone else should back up their site and test the update on staging once RC1 or RC2 is available, rather than waiting to update on launch day.

Getting ready before WordPress 7.1 launches

WordPress 7.1 doesn’t reinvent the platform, and that’s the point. It finishes the styling, media, and admin improvements that WordPress 7.0 started, and it does it without asking you to relearn how the editor works. Between now and August 19, the smart move is simple: install RC1 or RC2 on a staging site, check your plugins and custom blocks against the new requirements, and give yourself time to fix anything that breaks before it matters. WordPress 7.1 rewards that little bit of prep with a smoother launch day.