WordPress 7.0 was originally scheduled to launch at WordCamp Asia in Mumbai on April 9. A delay announced March 31 pushed the release into an extended review period, with the core team committing to publish a revised schedule by April 22. The new release date is May 20, 2026.

The delay is driven by unresolved issues in the real-time collaboration feature, which is the headline feature of 7.0, bringing live multi-user editing with synchronized cursors to the block editor. The implementation was ready enough to ship release candidates but not ready enough to pass the scrutiny that came with broader testing, particularly from web hosts. The core team chose to hold rather than ship and patch.

What Changes in the Release Process

The revised process introduces an unusual versioning situation. RC3 will function as a new Beta 1 in practice, and RC4 will function as a new RC1 — but both will carry release candidate version strings in the software. The core team made this decision to avoid complications with WordPress’s internal version comparison functions, which would behave unpredictably if the team reverted to beta numbering after already shipping RC builds.

The development branch is closed to new commits for the 7.1 cycle until WordPress 7.0 ships. All backports to the 7.0 branch require sign-off from two core committers. Only bug fixes, stability improvements, and tooling changes related to real-time collaboration are permitted during the pause.

WordPress 7.0 Ships AI Connectors: Infrastructure, Not Features

Key Insights for Hosting Providers

The minimum PHP requirement for WordPress 7.0 rises from 7.2/7.3 to 7.4, with 8.3 as the recommended version. Any hosting provider still running PHP 7.2 or 7.3 environments as a default will face customer friction at the point of upgrade. The window before release is narrowing. Providers who have not yet updated their default PHP offerings or communicated the requirement change to customers should treat the revised May timeline as a hard deadline for those actions.

The real-time collaboration feature also introduces new server-side requirements that differ from standard WordPress installations. Detailed guidance on infrastructure preparation will be published closer to the final release date.