WordPress 7.1: What's New, Release History & Support Lifecycle

What Is New in WordPress 7.1

What changed with responsive styling in WordPress 7.1?

WordPress 7.1 lets you set per-breakpoint styles directly in the Site Editor, without writing custom CSS. You can adjust how a block looks at different screen sizes from Global Styles or from individual block settings, and preview the results at different viewport widths as you work.

In practice, this closes a long-standing gap for teams who previously reached for a child theme stylesheet or a CSS block just to hide an element on mobile or resize a heading on tablet. Combined with the existing show/hide block visibility options, most simple responsive adjustments no longer require touching code.

Theme authors get a companion capability here too: block themes can now define their own mobile and tablet breakpoints in theme.json, overriding the WordPress defaults. Watch out for this if you maintain a theme with hardcoded breakpoint assumptions in custom JavaScript, since the effective breakpoint values may now differ from what you expect out of the box.

How does the new media editor change image cropping in WordPress?

The new media editor replaces the old inline cropping tool with a single dedicated modal that combines cropping, flipping, rotation, and metadata editing. The familiar Crop button is still the entry point, so the change is mostly about what opens when you click it, not where to find it.

• Freeform and aspect-ratio cropping in one interface
• Horizontal and vertical flipping
• Fine-grained and snap rotation controls
• Metadata editing alongside the crop workflow

This matters if your editorial workflow involves batch image cleanup, since consolidating these tools into one modal removes the need to jump between separate screens for cropping versus metadata edits.

Why does image processing now happen in the browser?

WordPress 7.1 moves image compression, resizing, and thumbnail generation to the browser using a WebAssembly build of libvips, which reduces the load on your server and helps avoid PHP memory limit and upload timeout issues on larger files.

Most teams running shared hosting or lower-memory PHP environments will notice fewer failed uploads on large photos, since the heavy lifting now happens client-side before the file reaches the server. This pairs with native support for AVIF, HEIC, and HDR gain map formats, so images straight off modern phones and cameras no longer need a plugin to be usable.

Also new: opt-in GIF-to-video conversion for smaller file sizes, upload progress indicators, and automatic retry on interrupted uploads. The Media Library switches to infinite scrolling by default, though a per-user setting lets individuals opt back into pagination.

What is new for collaboration with the Notes feature in WordPress 7.1?

Notes in WordPress 7.1 support rich text formatting and @mentions, and are no longer limited to the block level. You can now leave a note on a specific piece of text within a block, keep multiple separate conversations going on the same block, and collapse longer notes to keep the margin readable.

In practice, this makes Notes usable for the kind of granular editorial feedback that previously required a separate commenting plugin or an external doc. Typing @ mentions and notifies a collaborator directly, so review cycles stay inside the editor instead of spilling into Slack or email threads.

What should developers know about the new APIs in WordPress 7.1?

The SVG Icon API is now public, so developers can register their own icon collections and use them throughout the editor alongside the built-in set. Registration happens through three new functions:

wp_register_icon_collection();
wp_register_icon();
wp_get_icon();

The Abilities API, first introduced in WordPress 6.9, gains a filterable execution lifecycle, custom validation, and shared discovery in 7.1, making it more practical to build integrations and automation, including AI-powered tooling, on top of WordPress core.

A new Design System also ships with this release, providing semantic design tokens and a ThemeProvider React component for theming custom admin screens. This matters if you build custom admin interfaces or plugin dashboards, since it gives you a way to stay visually consistent with WordPress core without hand-rolling your own token system.

Theme authors additionally get pseudo-state styling (hover, focus, focus-visible, active) through theme.json, along with new filters for configuring DataViews and DataForm screens that power Pages, Templates, Parts, and Patterns in the Site Editor.