As this year comes to a close, I’ve got one final Within WP newsletter for you to close off the year. There’s a lot here, so checking out every single link _should_ last you to the next edition. Probably the second week of January 2026, but we’ll see.
Hope you enjoy it!
The planning for WordPress 7.0 is already underway, but let’s look a little bit deeper into what WordPress 6.9 brought to the table. Especially from a performance point of view, because there were some really great improvements that I’d love to highlight a bit more.
- WordPress 6.9 delivers significant performance improvements designed to improve the site loading experience for visitors. Your Core Web Vitals, so to say. Check out Weston Ruter‘s extensive WordPress 6.9 Frontend Performance Field Guide
- Here’s one I’m incredibly happy with: updated Query Cache Handling. The 6.9 release changes how cache keys are created when caching queries performed through WP_Query.
- Legacy Internet Explorer Code is now removed. So, make sure you clean up in your old projects what can be cleaned up. Cleaner code is faster code. Always.
And while we’re on the topic of performance improvements, let’s talk about WooCommerce’s strides as well. Because with WordPress 6.9 released now, WooCommerce’s 10.4 has added quite a bit to performance upgrades as well.
- The HPOS Datastore caching feature moves out of “experimental” mode and is now fully turned on for new stores. This means that if you haven’t updated your WooCommerce store to HPOS storage for all the various elements, now really is the time to start checking out that feature again and test if you can finally upgrade. Because you should. The performance gain is quite the gain to get.
- The wc-admin and wc-analytics REST API endpoints are now lazy-loaded. This means that requests not using them should be about 30–60 ms faster.
🗞️ Within WordPress News
Here’s what I saw happening this past period:
- Take a look at the last ”What’s new for developers?”, December 2025 edition. It’s the list of the latest and greatest new things in WordPress you absolutely want to read up on.
- Courtney Robertson shared a new plugin she built. First one in eleven years, she said, and it’s a great one. I’ve always been a fan of WordPress’ Post Formats, but as a whole, it’s never really taken off. Well, maybe her plugin will change that. Check out Post Formats for Block Themes.
- We’re finally going to go from “WorsePress” to a WordPress version with proper responsive controls “soon”.
Combining that with the option to hide blocks based on screen size is :chef’s kiss:
- My buddy Ian Svoboda is on a roll! He’s been pumping out really useful blog posts. These two stand out:
- 4 new essential modern CSS features for WordPress Development
- and this one: How to add a gradient text effect to specific words in a block (which you can see him use on his site!)
- Sybre Waaijer, famously known for The SEO Framework released Troy. It allows you to host plugins yourself with a plugin suite.
- Another super cool solution: GitHub to WordPress Sync by Sinan Isler allows you to streamline theme and plugin updates directly from GitHub. Easy, secure, and developer-friendly.
🤖 WordPress & AI
- Get inspired by what you can do with Claude and browse practical examples across research, writing, coding, analysis, and everyday tasks, whether you’re working solo or with a team.
I’ve played with this quite a bit, and it’s super useful and fun.
- Varun Dubey released WPCS MCP Server. It’s an MCP server that lets Claude AI enforce WordPress Coding Standards on your plugins and themes.
- James LePage, Engineering Director AI at Automattic and WordPress Core AI Co-Lead, shared some upcoming experiments for the AI WordPress plugin: these features aim to enhance AI capabilities in WordPress core and plugins. Interested in your thoughts!
- More providers: GitHub Pull Request #148
- Request logging: GitHub Pull Request #149
- Typeahead: GitHub Pull Request #151
- MCP: GitHub Pull Request #152
- Comment Moderation: GitHub Pull Request #155
Performance Matters
- Perfmatters is doubling down on their code snippets solution that does not hurt performance in any way, shape, or form. In other words, if you have to have snippets inside WordPress, Perfmatters version 2.5.5 IS THE WAY!
- Console insights in Chrome DevTools uses Gemini to explain console warnings and errors and suggest code fixes in-line. I’ve used it and it really helps you in skipping the guesswork and the never-ending tab switching.
- Fun read by Yoav Weiss: How to load CSS (fast)
🔆 Within WordPress Highlight
WordPress Gives a Hand (#WPGivesAHand), the annual charity initiative that brings together companies, creators, and professionals from across the WordPress ecosystem, returns for its sixth edition from December 22 to 28, 2025.
What started in 2020 as a straightforward effort to help those in need has grown into a well-established community tradition. Today, it is a collective movement where WordPress businesses contribute a portion of their revenue to causes they care about. Over the years, participating companies have raised tens of thousands of dollars, supporting charities and nonprofit organizations that create real impact around the world.
Initiated by WPBakery, WordPress Gives a Hand is a community-led effort that invites WordPress businesses and professionals to give back during the final week of December. Since its launch in 2020, it has become an annual moment of generosity, raising awareness and turning good intentions into concrete action across the global WordPress community.
I am proud to support WordPress Gives a Hand as one of its media partners and to help spread the word about an initiative that shows what our community can achieve when it comes together for something bigger than itself. Go check out their website: https://wpgivesahand.com/
💡 Interesting Finds
- Small but good QOL improvement over at Google Search Control as they allow you to adjust the time aggregation of any of the performance charts, helping you smooth out daily changes and focus on the overall trend of traffic to your website.
- The URL Pattern API is Newly Available for Firefox. Use it to match and extract parts of URLs, no need to reinvent routing logic. Supports literals, wildcards, named groups, and even regex constraints. Learn how it works here.
🛒 WooCommerce News
- Woo and Mastercard are teaming up to accelerate digital acceptance in ecommerce! This collaboration will empower merchants by tapping into Mastercard’s powerful, local payment options.
This is pretty big!
- As a reminder, now’s the time to prepare your clients’ stores for 2026 EU tax changes.
- Another big one from Woo: Stripe announced Agentic Commerce Suite, a new platform that enables Stripe customers to sell through multiple AI agents with a single integration, and WooCommerce is a launch partner.
🔎 Scanfully Updates
Have you seen our next big feature release for Scanfully, {{ subscriber.first_name | strip | default: “” }}? We pushed our first Content Health feature in beta: Broken Links. We’re scanning your WordPress content from outside WordPress, so there’s no strain on your database or site. The results are perfectly categorized as internal (requiring fast action) and external (at your leisure), but all are meant to help you keep your site as healthy as can be.
Oh, and from the report in your Scanfully Dashboard to your specific page in your WordPress site just takes one click. No clunky CSV file exports and whatnot.
Learn more about Broken Links here. Click and learn what exciting new feature is next!
🎁 Bonus
I like it when my friends argue over all things related to WordPress because that results in better solutions. Simple as that.
I don’t like it when those arguments turn sour and result in ad hominem insults. Nobody benefits from that. So I wrote about how we should do better, because we all lose when we do that.
That’s it for this week’s edition of Within WordPress. Thanks for reading, and happy holidays wherever you are!
Best, Remkus
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