On August 19, 2026, WordPress released version 7.1, code-named "Mary Lou" after the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams. It landed on the last day of WordCamp US in Phoenix, which is either great timing or a nightmare for anyone trying to enjoy the conference while also testing an upgrade. Either way, it's out, and there's a lot packed into this one.

If you're running WordPress and your site hasn't auto-updated yet, here's what you're getting into.

Responsive styling without custom CSS

This is the headline feature, and it's a long time coming. WordPress 7.1 brings responsive controls directly into the Site Editor. You can now style how a block looks at different screen sizes from Global Styles or individual block settings, without writing a single line of custom CSS. The editor also lets you preview changes at different viewport sizes as you work.

For anyone who has been writing @media (max-width: 768px) rules by hand to fix things the block editor broke, this is a welcome relief. Block themes can now define their own mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json, overriding the defaults. If you've been using a theme that made questionable responsive decisions, you can now fix them from the UI.

Browser-side image processing

WordPress 7.1 moves image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation into the browser. Instead of sending a 4MB photo from your phone to the server and waiting for PHP to chew through it, your browser handles the heavy lifting before the upload even starts. This reduces server load, produces smaller files, and eliminates the PHP memory limit errors that have plagued image uploads on shared hosting for years.

The release also adds native support for AVIF, HEIC, and HDR gain maps. If you've been converting your phone's HEIC photos to JPEG before uploading them, you can stop doing that. WordPress finally understands the formats modern cameras actually produce.

A real media editor

The old inline cropping tool has been replaced with a proper media editor modal. It includes freeform and aspect-ratio cropping, horizontal and vertical flipping, precise rotation control, and metadata editing, all in one place. The Crop button still works the way you expect, but now it opens something that doesn't feel like it was designed in 2012.

Inline notes with mentions and rich text

Collaboration in the block editor just got meaningfully better. Notes now support rich text formatting — bold, italic, code, links — and you can type @ to mention a collaborator and notify them directly. You can also leave a note on a specific piece of text instead of an entire block, run multiple conversations on the same block, and collapse longer notes to keep the margin clean.

This is the kind of feature that makes WordPress viable as a collaborative editing platform, not just a publishing tool. If you've been using Google Docs for drafts and then pasting into WordPress because the editing experience was too solitary, that gap just got smaller.

Two new blocks: Playlist and Tabs

The Playlist block lets you combine multiple audio tracks with an optional waveform visualization. If you run a podcast or music site, this replaces the janky embed-and-pray approach with something native.

The Tabs block organizes content into tabbed panels. It's simple, but it solves a real layout problem. FAQ pages, product comparisons, documentation — anywhere you'd normally stack everything vertically and hope people scroll, you can now tab it.

The SVG Icon API

Developers can now register custom icon collections that show up alongside WordPress's built-in icon library in the editor. This is a small thing for end users but a significant quality-of-life improvement for anyone building custom themes or client sites where the default icon set doesn't cut it.

The admin bar follows you everywhere

The WordPress admin bar now persists across all editors — post editor, site editor, everywhere. It's a small consistency fix, but it eliminates that disorienting moment when you switch contexts and lose your navigation anchor.

What to do right now

If your site auto-updates, you probably already have 7.1. Check your dashboard. If you're managing sites manually, update soon — not just for the features, but because 7.0.2 and 7.0.3 shipped critical security fixes in the past month, and 7.1 includes all of those.

Test your plugins and themes against 7.1 before pushing it to production, especially if you rely on custom CSS media queries or the old cropping behavior. The responsive styling changes and the always-iframed post editor could affect custom block styles.

And if you're at WordCamp US this week, congratulations — you got a release party and a conference in one trip.