- WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 was published on February 7th, 2023, and WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 was made available for testing on February 14th, one week after the release of Beta 1.
- Beta 2 includes fixes for 71 bugs discovered since the previous week’s release, as well as the latest Gutenberg plugin 15.1 release.
- WordPress 6.2 further improves the fix in WordPress 5.9 about a performance issue in which WordPress’ default of lazy loading all images resulted in lower performance on the largest contentful paint metric (LCP).
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS that allows you to publish content easily on the web. It’s used by over 60 million websites and blogs, ranging from small personal blogs to large companies and organizations.
WordPress 6.2 Beta 1 was released on the 7th of February and 6.2 will be the first major release of 2023. WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 is now available for testing, one week after Beta 1.
71 fixes and performance improvements for Gutenberg
Beta 2 contains fixes for 71 issues discovered since the previous week’s release, as well as the most recent Gutenberg 15.1 release, which was not included in Beta 1. This release contains more than 292 enhancements and 354 bug fixes for the editor, including more than 238 tickets for the WordPress 6.2 core.
At the beginning of last year, WordPress 5.9 addressed a performance bug in which WordPress’ default of lazy loading of all pictures resulted in poorer performance on the largest contentful paint measure (LCP). In certain circumstances, this resulted in 30% faster page loading. An update, packed with the 6.2 Beta 2 release, adds improved logic to detect the LCP image in block themes and avoid lazy-loading it.
How to test
WordPress 6.2 Beta 2 can be tested in three ways:
- Download and install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (choose the “Bleeding edge” channel and the “Beta/RC Only” stream).
- Download the Beta 2 version directly from WordPress servers as a .zip file
- Execute the WP-CLI command below:
upgrade wp core —version=6.2-beta2WordPress 6.2 is expected to be released on March 28, 2023.