WordPress 7.1 has officially arrived, bringing another substantial round of improvements to the world’s most popular website platform. The latest release focuses on making WordPress faster, more flexible and easier to work with, with improvements across responsive design, media handling, accessibility, collaboration and overall performance.
If you’re a HITS client, there’s nothing you need to do. Your website has already been upgraded to WordPress 7.1.
Thanks to our bespoke HITS CMS platform, which is built on top of WordPress, we’re able to test and roll out new WordPress releases across all supported client websites quickly and safely. This means your website stays secure, stable and up to date without you needing to manage updates yourself.
What’s New in WordPress 7.1?
WordPress 7.1, code-named “Mary Lou”, introduces a number of useful improvements for website owners, editors and developers.
Some of the highlights include:
- New responsive styling controls, allowing designs to be adjusted for different screen sizes directly within WordPress.
- Improved media editing, with a redesigned image editor offering better cropping, flipping, rotation and metadata controls.
- Faster image processing, with compression, resizing and thumbnail generation now able to take place within the browser, reducing server load.
- Improved Notes and collaboration, including inline notes, rich text and @mentions for people working together on website content.
- New Tabs and Playlist blocks, providing additional options for structuring and presenting content.
- Better support for modern image formats, including AVIF, HEIC and HDR gain maps.
- Improved accessibility throughout the WordPress admin area and editor.
- Further developer and API improvements, giving us even more flexibility when building bespoke functionality and integrations.
There are also numerous improvements behind the scenes covering performance, reliability and the editing experience. WordPress 7.1 includes more than 1,500 enhancements and fixes across the platform.
Why We Update So Quickly
Keeping WordPress updated isn’t just about getting access to new features. It plays an important role in maintaining the security, performance and long-term compatibility of your website.
At HITS, keeping client websites on the latest stable version of WordPress is part of our ongoing maintenance process.
Before rolling out a major WordPress update, we test it against our HITS CMS platform and the systems we use across our websites. Once we’re happy with compatibility and stability, we can deploy the update across our supported client websites.
It means our clients don’t need to worry about WordPress versions, compatibility checks or manually managing updates. We take care of that side of things.
Built to Keep Moving Forward
Our HITS CMS platform gives us the flexibility of WordPress while allowing us to build and maintain our own tools, functionality and integrations around it.
As WordPress continues to evolve, so does the platform behind our clients’ websites.
WordPress 7.1 brings some particularly useful improvements around responsive design, media processing and developer functionality, and every supported HITS client is already running the latest version.
If you have any questions about WordPress 7.1 or would like to know more about the HITS CMS platform, get in touch with our team.
