What’s New in WordPress 7.1? Top Features and Highlights

The wait is over! WordPress 7.1, also known as ‘Mary Lou,’ is here! This new WordPress release offers a range of new features and improvements for everyone.

WordPress 7.1 was just released on August 19, 2026. So, what exactly is new in WordPress 7.1?

Simply put, this major update brings improved collaborative notes, responsive styling without custom CSS, a new media editor, two new blocks, and many performance and accessibility improvements.

Want to know more in depth? This guide covers all the top features and highlights of the recent WordPress 7.1 version.

Dive right into the key changes of this release before updating your WordPress site.

What’s New in WordPress 7.1?

WordPress 7.1 is packed with new styling tools, an improved Notes feature, enhanced media handling, etc. Overall, you’ll find new functionalities along with updates to the existing tools and workflows.

These are only some major highlights. Now, check out the detailed guide on each of the new or improved features of WordPress 7.1. Let’s jump right into it!

1. Responsive Styling Without Custom CSS

WordPress 7.1 provides more responsive controls right inside the Site Editor. That too without writing custom CSS. Overall, the update gives you complete control over how your website looks across different screen sizes.

So, how does this feature work?

First, you can adjust the Global Styles or individual block settings of a page or post. For example, you can change the background color of a block. 

Now, when you click the ‘View’ option at the top, it lets you preview the changes at different viewport sizes. That’s how the WordPress 7.0.4 version worked. 

What’s different now is that you’ll also get sliding options for the viewports. Meaning, you can drag both sides of the viewport to resize the screen. This way, you can check your site on all sizes.

In addition, you can also find the new ‘Responsive styles’ option. After clicking that option, style the same block differently for each default screen size.

For instance, let’s click the ‘Tablet’ option. Now, let’s change the block to a different background color. Similarly, let’s select the ‘Mobile’ option. Then, change the same block to a completely different background color.

With that, switch between the different default screen sizes. You’ll find the background color of the same block to be different in those three screen sizes.

Amazing, isn’t it? Overall, this feature lets you:

• Control block visibility, layouts, and designs based on screen size.
• Preview how your design looks across different viewport sizes.
• Build your responsive website without relying much on custom CSS.

In fact, you can now even point out mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json yourself. This overrides the defaults for responsive styles and block visibility.

Check out our complete guide on how to create a mobile-friendly website.

2. Improved Notes for Collaboration

The Notes feature was previously launched in WordPress 6.9 for collaboration. In WordPress 7.1, you’ll get inline notes through rich-text formatting and @mentions. 

Check out the details on this Notes upgrade:

• First, you can add Notes to specific text of a block. Previously, one could add Notes to an entire block only.
• This lets you add several Notes and conversations on the same block.
• It’s possible to collapse the longer Notes to keep the editor neat and tidy.
• You can use rich-text formatting styles, for example, bold, italic, etc.
• Adding links and code in Notes is also acceptable.
• If you want to notify your collaborators, then use @mentions.

Ultimately, this update can help your team easily make content reviews. That’s through detailed content discussion and editing by the right team member.

3. New Media Editor and Enhanced Media Handling

Moving forward, WordPress 7.1 also introduces a new media editor modal. It now contains many image-editing tools packed together in a single location.

First, you’ll find the familiar ‘Crop’ option in the toolbar that opens this editor. 

There, you can now find several options to let you:

• Crop images in freeform or use the aspect-ratio cropping presets.
• Rotate images precisely or use snap rotation controls.
• Flip images horizontally or vertically.
• Zoom in and out of the image.
• Edit image metadata, including title, alt text, caption, and description.

That’s not all! WordPress 7.1 offers more improvements to media handling. 

First, image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation are now available right inside the browser via WebAssembly. As a result, this minimizes server-side processing, avoids PHP memory limits, and prevents upload timeouts.

In addition, it now supports modern formats, like native AVIF, HEIC, and HDR gain maps. Therefore, WordPress 7.1 offers more flexible image editing and media handling. Ultimately, this reduces the processing workload on your server.

4. New Playlist and Tabs Blocks

On top of that, the new WordPress 7.1 version also offers two new blocks. They are the Playlist and Tabs blocks. Let’s go through them one by one.

I. Playlist Block

The main aim of the Playlist block is to insert several audio tracks together in one playlist. Just insert the Playlist block into your page and post. Then, upload multiple audio tracks. By default, this will give you a waveform and a list of tracks.

Simply put, a waveform offers a visual sense of each playing track. Your listeners can just select a track, and the audio plays with its waveform.

What’s more? You’ll get configuration settings and styling options. On the ‘Settings’ tab, you’ll find these configuration settings:

• You can configure it to show or hide the tracklist, artist name, track numbers, track duration, and track images.
• Pick a descending or ascending order for the tracklist.
• Insert custom styles into the Playlist block.

On the ‘Styles’ tab, these are the styling options that you’ll get:

• Pick typography color, font size, and background color.
• Set the dimensions, margins, and borders.
• Add a link to the tracks.
• Choose colors for the waveform, the play button, and the entire background.
• Select the type of waveform from bars, mirrors, lines, blocks, and more.

II. Tabs Block

The new release also introduces the Tabs block. As the name suggests, this block will help you organize content into tabbed panels. Meaning, you’ll get a cleaner way to showcase related information instead of showing everything at once.

Just insert the Tabs block in your post or page. There, insert the titles and content of each tab. The content for each tab can be a combination of any kind of block.

Now, let’s focus on its configuration options. If you open the block settings, you can pick the default tab. Plus, you can set labels for each tab.

Moreover, you’ll find styling options for each tab or the entire block. These are some of the styling controls:

• Typography and background color.
• Font size for the text.
• Padding, margin, and block spacing for adjusting dimensions.
• Layout of each tab.

5. Consistent WordPress Admin Toolbar

Did you realize that you had to move back from the page editor to your dashboard to get access to your admin toolbar? Not anymore!

WordPress 7.1 now keeps the admin toolbar visible across WordPress editors. This means you’ll get a consistent navigation bar between the dashboard and editors.

As a result, you can easily and quickly move between different parts of your website without losing access to familiar tools at the top. This includes:

• Adding a new post, page, media, or user.
• Handling the comments.
• Accessing the search commands.
• Updating WordPress core, etc.

In addition, you’ll also get small visual updates to the WordPress admin toolbar.

6. Custom Icons with the SVG Icon API

Do you find the built-in icons not enough for your website needs? Good news!

The WordPress 7.1 version introduces a public SVG Icon API. Now, developers can add custom icon collections to WordPress.

Meaning, these custom icons will appear along with the built-in icons in the editor. Now, you can choose from many icons for creating themes, plugins, and websites.

Just create or prepare your SVG icon files. Then, register the icon collection using the SVG Icon API. Next, register each of the individual icons within that collection. Afterward, load the icons in the relevant theme or plugin.

That’s how to use the registered icons in supported WordPress editor sections.

7. Additional Improvements in WordPress 7.1

Lastly, there are more developer-friendly features in the WordPress 7.1 version. Further, you’ll also find improvements in accessibility and performance.

So, let’s check out some of these enhancements:

I. Developer-Friendly Features

• Improved Abilities API. Better validation, discovery, and execution controls for integrations and automation, such as AI tools.
• A new design system that offers shared design tokens for colors, spacing, roundness, and other interface components.
• Different pseudo-state styles for hover, focus, focus-visible, and active states. Theme authors can do that through theme.json. 
• New filters for DataViews and DataForm screen configurations. This powers Pages, Templates, Parts, and Patterns in the Site Editor.
• Enhanced authentication in Connectors API for external service integrations.

Check out the best web hosting services for developers.

II. Accessibility Enhancements

• New functions that make tooltips and toggletips accessible.
• Clearer labels and more predictable navigation for improved screen readers.
• Changes to the editor navigation and interactions for easy content creation.

Here’s our shortlist of the best WordPress accessibility plugins.

III. Performance Improvements

• Configure how WordPress preloads pages with speculative loading controls.
• Opt-in feature for converting GIFs into videos to reduce file sizes.
• Upload progress shows how far your media upload has progressed.
• Automatic upload retries after upload failure (due to connection issues).
• Infinite scrolling of the media library with the possibility to switch back to pagination.

Thanks to all those 800+ contributors for the amazing WordPress 7.1 release! Learn more from WordPress.org news.

Frequently Asked Questions on WordPress 7.1

Wrapping Up

That’s everything about the recent WordPress 7.1 version!

If you haven’t tried it yet, then download it from WordPress.org or update it on your WordPress website now.

Which new feature or improvement did you like the most? Comment below.

If you have any confusion, mention it so that we can help or guide you.

Meanwhile, check out our other articles on WordPress trends and WordPress statistics. Also, learn how to check your WordPress version.

Don’t forget to follow us on X and Facebook to get more updates.