WordPress 6.8 – nicknamed “Cecil” after Cecil Taylor was released on Tuesday. It’s the first release of 2025 and also the last release of 2025 as well, as there has been discussion of reducing the amount of releases to one a year until 2027.
Anyway, it’s quite an exciting release for me: which means there’s a lot of things under the hood really, rather than anything major to see, but there’s some nice improvements for performance, accessibility and security (which is why this post is a bit image light, but trust me, it’s very exciting!). This is what I’m going to be focussing on this time around.
Speculative Loading Support
If you do any sort of WordPress performance optimisation, you will know about prefetch and pre-rendering. This is where you load resources before you know you need them. So if you know you may need an resource lower down the page, you will prefetch it at the top of the page, effectively assigning spare resources to load this.
How about you do it before you even click on a link?
That’s what speculative loading does.
Speculative loading will analyse the page and then determine the links that are more likely to be clicked on, and then preload them. By default it will speculatively load any link that isn’t the admin link or login within WordPress. It does it with “conservative eagerness”, which occurs between hovering on a link or clicking on a link – so if you hover on a link for a decent length of time, it’ll prefetch and pre-render that link. There are examples you may want to give more speedy results: so if for example you have a javascript heavy link that converts well, you may want to make it prefetch and pre-render that link whilst the previous page loads, for example.
It’s been a feature plugin for ages, as although it’s still not adopted outside of Chrome & Microsoft Edge, it doesn’t really have an impact not on those browsers, so whilst the “Can I Use” adoption is low, it’s safe to use.
This really can speed up WordPress. I’ve heard it’ll decrease page loads by up to half a second. That’s massive improvements to the speed of the web. And it’s in your new WordPress website.
Passwords now use bcrypt
WordPress 6.8 will see a couple of nice security updates present on the site. One of which you won’t see, another you shouldn’t see.
The first is that the hashing algorithm for passwords will be bcrypt. bcrypt is more secure as it becomes a lot more computationally expensive to crack passwords hashes (parts of the password that decrypt passwords from a string of characters to the actual password). Providing you have a secure password, you should not be able to be brute forced. You shouldn’t need to do anything – it’ll be updated in real time. The only thing that will still use the (less secure but still secure for most use cases) phpass would be post passwords – so may sure they are secure.
Improvements to a bunch of blocks
There are a number of improvements on a lot of the blocks out there. One such improvement is the ability to set any image on an image block as the “Featured” image. There are also changes to the Query Loop block in that you can ignore some elements like sticky posts. Again, nothing major, but some nice improvements.
Other WordPress 6.8 new features
The above are the new features in WordPress 6.8 I’m most excited about. There are more, and I’ve listed them below:-
- Improvements to the Full site editor including
- Enhancements to the Style book allowing you to manage your designs better.
- Starter Content is integrated into the page, rather than a modal on page load.
- A ton of Accessibility Changes
- WP_Query Cache Keys Improvement.
You can read more about these in the Release Notes.
Be Sure to Upgrade
If you are on one of my WordPress Maintenance plans, you should already be on WordPress 6.8, or will be very soon. If not, send me an email and see what I can do for you.
Featured Image: “Cecil Taylor-8” by andynew is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.