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WordPress Recap 2024: Key Updates, Releases, and Community Highlights
With the Automattic vs. WP Engine battle dominating headlines at the tail end of the year, it’s easy to forget that 2024 was a huge one for WordPress even without all the drama.
In this WordPress 2024 Recap, we look back over the year that was, highlighting the major releases, developments, and news surrounding the web’s most popular Content Management System.
WordPress Recap 2024
January – Liberating Data, Improving Performance
2024 arrived with an air of celebration surrounding the WordPress community, and it was all thanks to Taylor Swift.
Just days before the New Year, the pop megastar had been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, prompting a staggering 100K requests per second to her WordPress-powered website.
Swiftie or not, there was no denying this spoke volumes about the CMS’s scalability and ability to handle huge traffic volumes.
Still, WordPress has never been a platform to rest on its laurels, and there was lots more in store for January, including:
- The WordPress Data Liberation Project – Officially announced by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg on January 12, the Data Liberation Project was designed to give users more control over their site data and make it easier to migrate to and from WordPress.
Phase 1 kicked off with a call for clear, practical WordPress migration tutorials. At time of writing (January 2025), the project is now in Phase 3, with the development of a browser extension which ‘liberates your data any website, including social media, closed page builders, and design tools like Figma’
- Official Performance Plugins Released – Almost two years after the release of their Performance Lab the Official WordPress Core Performance Team released two new plugins designed to improve page load speeds.
On January 24, the team announced Auto-sizes for Lazy-Loaded Images, which further enhanced user’s ability to speed up lazy-loaded images. This function was later incorporated into WordPress 6.7 in November, and further improved in WordPress 6.71.
The team also launched Speculation Rules, which uses the Speculation Rules API to give a user’s browser hints about the pages they might click on, allowing the browser to pre-fetch certain elements.
February – Block Editor Boost, WooCommerce 8.6 Released
The good news continued in February with the results from the annual WordPress user and developer survey revealing an uptake in Gutenberg block editor usage and familiarity.
In other February highlights:
- WooCommerce 8.6 released – After a slight delay, the latest version of WooCommerce was released on February 16. This introduced several well-received features, including order attribution tracking and greater integration with the block editor.
March
March was supposed to be the month that we saw WordPress 6.5 released. However, the first major update of the year was put on hold due to disagreements over a new feature that would have forced some website owners to use an additional plugin in order to remain functional.
Still, there was a lot going on while we waited for 6.5’s arrival:
WordCamp Asia 2024 – Over 2,000 WordPress developers and enthusiasts flocked to Taipei, Taiwan over the weekend of March 7 – 9 for Asia’s biggest WordPress community event.
Highlights included presentations from Human Made CGO Noel Tock on the future of WordPress, accessibility advocate Anne-Mieke Bovelettand’s talk on countering developer and manager arguments against accessibility, and a Q&A with Matt Mullenweg himself.
- New Bluehost / Automattic Hosting Partnership Announced – Bluehost has long had a favorable relationship with WordPress. It was the first web hosting provider to be officially recommended by WordPress.org. On March 7, the company announced a new partnership with one of Automattic’s brands, WP Cloud, to ‘usher in a new era of WordPress hosting with a new service called Bluehost Cloud.
April – WordPress 6.5 Released, Report Highlights Common Security Mistakes
With spring in full bloom, April brought two big announcements to the WordPress community:
WordPress 6.5 Finally Released – WordPress 6.5 was launched on April 2nd.
Code-named ‘Regina,’ 2024’s first major update brought new changes and improvements including the new font-library that had been at the heart of March’s delays, block editor enhancements, and the new Interactivity API.
- Report Reveals Common Security Errors – WPScan’s 2024 WordPress Security report revealed the most common and avoidable errors WordPress users make that could make their sites more susceptible to an attack.
Highlighting the importance of a proactive approach to WordPress security, the report noted that weak passwords and nulled plugins were among the top causes of security vulnerabilities.
May – WordPress Studio and Playground Released
May was a big month. Not only was WordPress version 6.5.2 released to improve upon April’s version 6.5, but we also got two brand new products:
WordPress Desktop Studio for Windows – In late May, the WordPress Desktop Studio that had been launched for MacOS devices the previous month was officially made available for desktop.
The free Studio app allows developers to create and share sites in a local environment.
- WordPress Playground – Giving site creators more tools to explore and experiment, WordPress Playground was launched to much excitement, making it easy to throw up a sandbox WordPress environment in a single click.
June – WordCamp Europe, WordPress 6.6 Release Candidate Launched
The biggest WordPress event of the summer came live from Italy as the city of Turin hosted WordCamp Europe 2024.
Held from June 13 – 15, the second of the three major flagship WordCamp events (the others being Asia and US) saw presentations from the likes of WordPress Playground creator, Adam Zieliński and SEO expert Isaline Muelhauser.
Matt Mullenweg was also in attendance, delivering the ‘WordPress Summer Update’ as the event’s final keynote presentation.
WordCamp Europe 2024: Matt Mullenweg Keynote Presentation
Elsewhere in June:
- WordPress 6.6 RC1 Released – The first release candidate for WordPress 6.6 was made available on June 25. This allowed users to test the new version on a staging or local environment before it was officially released later that summer.
July – WordPress 6.6 Released
Weeks after the release candidate became available, the full version of WordPress 6.6 was officially released on June 16.
As we noted in our WordPress 6.6 preview published the week before its launch, 2024’s second major update introduced more design options to block themes, roll-backs for automatic updates, and a much-needed ability to customize content within synced patterns on different pages.
August – Gutenberg 19 Released
The big summer updates continued as August 14 heralded the arrival of Gutenberg 19, the latest upgrade to the WordPress block editor.
The new release featured two experimental features, including the ability to connect blocks to custom fields in order to improve the editing experience. This was later integrated into WordPress core with the November release of 6.7.
The other experimental feature added a Quick Edit feature in the Side Editor – Pages interface.
Other updates brought in by Gutenberg 19 included a simplified Data Views interface and manual zoom-out capabilities.
September – The ‘WordPress Drama’ Begins
As summer gave way to fall, all eyes were on the upcoming WordCamp US event in Portland, Oregon.
Taking place from September 17 – 20, WordCamp 2024’s expert speakers included the likes of Disney’s Alexandra Guffey, AgentWP creator James LePage, and CNN Brazil Technical Lead João Carvalho.
Despite the wealth of knowledge, insights, and experiences shared by all the participating speakers, it was Matt Mullenweg who dominated the headlines coming out of the event.
Taking to the stage on the final day of the event, Mullenweg shocked the WordPress community by using his keynote address to take aim at WordCamp sponsor WP Engine and officially ‘go nuclear’ on the hosting company.
The fallout became so messy and complicated that we started our own WordPress Drama Live Blog to keep track of all the details.
If you want the abridged version, here it is:
Mullenweg criticized WP Engine for its contributions to the core WordPress project, noting that they were disproportionately low for a company that had made so much money from WordPress.
Soon, however, it emerged that at the heart of the issue was a disagreement around WordPress trademarks and appropriate licensing.
As you’ll see below, reports of lawsuits, counter-suits, and hijacked plugins will continue for the rest of 2024.
October – The Drama Intensifies, Users Get Tighter Security
October started on a bright note for WordPress.
On October 1st, WordPress.org introduced stricter account security measures for plugin and theme authors, including compulsory Two-Factor Authentication and SVN passwords.
The move was largely met with a positive reaction by the WordPress community. However, the same could not be said for some of the moves made in the ongoing ‘WordPress Drama’ between Mullenweg, his company Automattic, and WP Engine.
Some of the bigger headlines coming out of this story included:
- WP Engine Sued Automattic for ‘Extortion’ – Weeks after Mullenweg blocked WP Engine from accessing WordPress, the company retaliated with a federal lawsuit against both Automattic and Mullenweg himself.
- Automattic Launched a WP Engine Tracker – A website was set up to monitor the number of customers leaving WP Engine. The site was subsequently blocked by leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) Cloudflare for ‘suspected phishing.’
November – WP 6.7 Released, ACF ‘Hijacked’
With so much going on you’d be forgiven for forgetting that WordPress 6.7 was officially released on November 12th.
As you may recall from our report on WordPress 6.7’s new features and updates, the final major update of the year gave us the official Twenty Twenty-Five theme, long-overdue support for HEIC files, and block editing enhancements among other notable improvements.
Also in November:
- Automattic ‘clones’ Advanced Custom Fields – Just when you thought the drama had died down, Automattic took over the popular Advanced Custom Fields’ plugin developed by WP Engine, making a clone of the plugin and releasing it as ‘Secure Custom Fields.’
This only intensified the backlash against Automattic and Matt Mullenweg, who were accused of ‘hijacking’ the plugin, undermining trust in the plugin ecosystem, and causing problems for developers whose clients relied on that plugin.
December – Injunctions Granted, Services Paused
As the year came to a close, Matt Mullenweg delivered his annual State of The Word Address in Tokyo, Japan.
In his first big public speech since the WordCamp incident, Mullenweg used his platform not to further escalate the drama, but rather to praise the success of WordPress over the past 12 months and celebrate the contributors who made it happen.
Yet that was by far the only big WordPress story we’d see in 2024.
There was also:
Matt Mullenweg Paused WordPress Registrations – A week after his presentation in Japan, Mullenweg made the controversial move to hit the pause button on several important services, including new WordPress.org account registrations, and new plugin, theme, and photo directory submissions.
The move was widely criticized, with Yoast Co-Founder Joost de Valk and members of the WP community calling for a change in leadership.
It also had far-reaching consequences. Since users need a WordPress.org account to buy WordCamp tickets, new users hoping to get tickets for events in the early part of 2025 were prohibited from doing so. meaning that people couldn’t buy tickets to upcoming WordCamp events because users need a WordPress
2025 – What Lies Ahead for the Future of WordPress?
2024 was a year where excitement and controversy engulfed the WordPress community in equal measure.
With three new major updates and improvements to both performance and security, there were certainly many reasons to celebrate. However, as fall became winter and the whole situation now unanimously referred to as ‘The WordPress’ drama took center stage, many of the community left 2024 in the rear view mirror with serious questions about the future of WordPress.
Now that 2025 is firmly upon us, it’s fair to say that we don’t yet have the answers to these questions.
The legal battle continues and Matt Mullenweg’s actions continue to divide the very community he helped create. The good news, is that while all this is going on, new updates will continue to roll out and members of the community will continue to grow and evolve the platform so many of us know and love
If there’s one thing we do know for sure, it’s that 2025 is going to be a very interesting year for WordPress, and we at WPLift will be here to bring you all the latest news and developments.
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