13 Nov 2026, 10:30 pm

October 30 – November 12, 2026

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog! This round is about giving you more control over your site, whether you’re moving in, building out, or handing the busywork to your AI.

We’ll move your Wix, Squarespace, or AI-built site to WordPress.com

Moving to WordPress.com just got a lot easier. If you own a site on Wix, Squarespace, another AI provider or WordPress host, you can just paste your site’s address into wordpress.com/move, pick a plan that suits your needs, and we move it for you.

The move runs in the background, and you get an email when it’s done. If a move doesn’t work, our team moves your site for free, or you get your money back.

Learn more in our blog post: Moving your site used to mean starting over. Not anymore.

SSH, WP-CLI, and GitHub Deployments now come with Personal and Premium plans

The developer tools you rely on are no longer just for Business plans and above. On any paid plan, you can now connect over SSH or SFTP, run WP-CLI and Git commands, and deploy from GitHub. If a plugin breaks your site, you can fix it yourself instead of waiting on support.

To get started, turn on hosting features in your site’s settings.

Manage more of your site from your AI

If you’ve connected an AI like ChatGPT or Claude to your WordPress.com site, it can now help you with more of the behind the scenes work on your site. Your AI now has access to more abilities like:

• Domains and email
  • Update your domain’s contact details and privacy settings
  • Set up domain and email forwarding
  • View your site’s SSL settings and update DNSSEC
• Site management
  • Change your site address
  • Start a site ownership transfer
  • Delete or reset a site
  • Import content from an export file
  • View and change a site’s PHP and WordPress versions
  • Read a site’s server logs
• Developer tools
  • List the SSH keys on your account
  • Deploy GitHub repositories to your sites
  • Migrate an existing WordPress site to WordPress.com
• Growth and reach
  • Turn on and manage WordAds
  • Connect a site to social services
• Reader and notifications
  • Search Reader feeds
  • Mark notifications as read or unread
• Account and privacy
  • Update your privacy preferences
  • Access your WordPress.com account settings

You decide how much you want to control and share in your MCP AI settings. And remember: any WordPress.com user can work on their site with an AI right now!

Manage SEO and AI crawler settings in one place

Your SEO settings now live together under Jetpack → SEO on Premium, Business, and Commerce plans. Set your site and author identity, spot missing SEO details, and choose which AI crawlers can access your site from the new GEO tab. You can also generate an llms.txt file for AI tools.

Learn more in our blog post: SEO tools for search and AI

Fixes and improvements

We’ve shipped additional reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com, including:

• Fixing the editor crash on older browsers. (GitHub PR)
• Renaming “Paid until” to “Renews on” in your domains list so you understand when your payment will process again. (GitHub PR)
• Showing a loading state while two-step authentication backup codes generate. (GitHub PR)
• Keeping your image’s title, caption, description, and alt text if you revert to the original photo. (GitHub PR)

12 Nov 2026, 11:54 pm

You built your website yourself. You picked the photos, wrote every page, and tweaked the colors until it felt like you.

Then everything started costing more. Your supplies, your rent, and the tools you run your business on. Search keeps changing, and fewer people find their way to your site.

Then one day it went down, right when a customer was looking, and you wished a real person could just help. You can’t control all of that. You can control what you pay for your website, and whether you own it.

So you thought about moving. And you found out moving meant starting over: rebuilding every page, losing your design, and saying goodbye to something you’d poured yourself into.

Not anymore.

Moving to WordPress.com? Your design comes with you

Moving to WordPress.com now brings your design with you, too. Paste your site’s address, and we bring your pages, images, and design over as a WordPress site you own.

Have a website on Squarespace, Wix, Lovable, Base44, or another builder? Your site’s address is all you need to get started. No files to download, nothing to rebuild.

What comes with you

Our site mover is built for small websites made mostly of pages with text and images, like a café, a dog groomer, or a photographer’s portfolio.

Here’s what comes over:

• Your pages, blog posts, text, and images.
• Your design: layout, colors, fonts, header, logo, and menu, as close to the original as we can get them.
• The links between your pages, so your site still flows the way you built it.

How to transfer your site to WordPress

From your existing website to a new home on WordPress.com, here’s how the move works:

1. Paste your site’s address: That’s all we need to get started; no files to download.
2. Pick a plan that fits: Plans start at $4 a month, billed yearly ($48 for the year), and every plan includes plugins, custom themes, a free domain name for your first year, and hosting that stays up when traffic spikes.
3. We handle the move for you: Your pages, images, and design come over as a WordPress site. Close the tab, and we’ll email you when it’s ready.
4. Check it and make it live: Open your new site next to your old one, then connect your domain name. A checklist walks you through it.

Once your new site is ready, it’s worth checking the details that help visitors find you after the move.

Keep your traffic and your content

Moving your website shouldn’t mean losing the people who already know where to find you.

Your old site stays live while you review the new one, and you decide when to switch. You can keep the same domain name, and if any page addresses change, redirects help visitors and search engines reach the right place.

Once you’ve moved, the next challenge is reaching new customers. WordPress.com takes care of the SEO groundwork for you. It automatically creates a sitemap to help search engines discover your pages.

On Premium plans and above, built-in Jetpack SEO tools let you customize SEO titles and descriptions and preview your pages in search results. No extra plugin needed.

And as more people turn to AI to find businesses, clearly explaining what you offer helps those tools understand your site, too.

Hosting that works as hard as you do

Plans start at $4 a month, billed yearly. Most paid builder plans currently start around $16 a month.

Every paid plan includes:

• Unlimited traffic: Go viral and your price stays the same.
• Your site stays online: Since 2005, WordPress.com sites have been up and running more than 99.99% of the time.
• Fast pages: Your site loads quickly wherever your visitors are, globally.
• Security, handled: A free SSL certificate, built-in protections that help keep your site safe, and updates done for you.
• 60,000+ plugins: Add bookings, newsletters, SEO tools, and more.
• A free domain name: Free for your first year, or keep the one you have.
• Real people to help: Our Happiness Engineers are here on every plan, and Business plans get 24/7 priority support.

Not sure how it compares to what you pay today? Use our savings calculator to see how much you could save.

Make it yours

Your moved site is a real WordPress site. Edit any page, add new ones, switch your design, and add plugins when you need them. No more builder limits.

Want a hand? WordPress Agent can edit your pages, write new content, and fix anything that didn’t come over quite right.

Bring your site to WordPress.com

You built something worth keeping. Now you can bring it to WordPress.com, design and all, without handling the migration yourself.

Our Happiness Engineers are ready to help if something doesn’t come over as expected. And if we can’t move your site, you’ll get a full refund. Every yearly plan also includes a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Plans start at $4 a month, billed yearly ($48 for the year).

12 Nov 2026, 9:00 am

Been meaning to start a newsletter? Now you can ask ChatGPT or Claude to start one on WordPress.com.

It can build your site, add subscribers, and even send your first issue all from the same conversation.

You’re still the one who says go.

Start your newsletter with a conversation

In the video above, the goal is to build a wedding website and keep guests updated by email.

Here’s the prompt:

Build a wedding site and newsletter on WordPress.com. Add our guest list as subscribers so we can send to everyone ASAP.

Attach your guest list and confirm the site name. Your agent creates the site, asks you to confirm you have permission to email everyone, and adds your guests as subscribers.

It launches the site when you say so and drafts your first email. When you reply “Send it,” the email goes to your guests.

You can use the same approach for a gardening newsletter, updates for your bakery’s regulars, or a weekly hiking guide.

What else can your AI assistant do?

The wedding newsletter is just one example. From building your site to welcoming subscribers and checking email performance, you can do more without leaving the conversation.

Build your website

Your agent creates a new WordPress.com site, writes the homepage, and launches it. You can also ask it to switch to a theme you like.

Ask your agent to find a .com domain for your site. It gives you a checkout link already set up for that site.

Welcome new subscribers

Ask your agent to write your welcome email and choose where replies go. It can also add sign-up forms and create topics readers can choose from.

Import your subscriber list

Paste or attach a subscriber list, including one exported from beehiiv, Kit, Ghost, Mailchimp, Medium, or Patreon. Your agent can add up to 100 people at a time.

On a paid plan, you can upload a larger list from your Subscribers screen. The free plan lets you import up to 100 subscribers, and new readers can still sign up on their own.

Publish your next issue

Your agent can draft a post, create a cover image, and publish it. Ready to send? Say the word, and WordPress.com emails your subscribers. You can also ask it to keep part of a post for subscribers only or publish to your site without sending an email.

Check delivery and readership

Ask “Did my newsletter go out?” to see how many people it reached. If something is stopping your emails, your agent tells you. When you can fix the problem, it also explains the cause, such as a site that hasn’t launched yet.

You can also ask your agent to report your views, visitors, and subscriber count.

How does it compare with other newsletter platforms?

Other newsletter platforms also connect with AI, but not all of them let you send an issue straight from the conversation. Here’s how they compare:

Comparison as of November 11, 2026, based on each company’s own help pages and docs.

Your newsletter lives on a website you own, where readers can find your posts on the web and subscribe. They can also follow you in the WordPress.com Reader.

WordPress.com has no subscriber or sending limits on any plan, including free.

Start your newsletter

Ready to give it a go? Connect WordPress.com to ChatGPT or Claude, sign in, and tell it what you want to create. Your assistant will guide you through the process and ask before making changes or sending anything.

The WordPress.com MCP connection is included on all paid plans and available on free sites through November. So there’s no time better than today to launch your newsletter.

For more inspiration, see what you can do with newsletters and AI. Need help connecting? Follow our MCP setup guide.

10 Nov 2026, 6:57 pm

One teacher’s introduction in Toledo helped open the door to WordPress.com Education’s first formal agreement with a regional government in Spain.

Under the agreement, Castilla-La Mancha will promote the Student plan across 40 vocational education centers, making it available to approximately 45,000 students.

The agreement marks another milestone for WordPress.com Education, which has already grown to more than 10,000 active students across 531 institutions in 66 countries.

That could give many more students the chance to build real websites, turn classroom assignments into portfolios, and share their work beyond school.

How the agreement came together

Educators in Castilla-La Mancha were already using WordPress.com with their students, and six centers in the region had adopted the program.

Then a teacher at the Toledo School of Art made an introduction that eventually led us to Sebastián Romero López, the regional coordinator for vocational education in IT and communications.

Sebastián had been looking for a free hosting solution for his students, so he invited the WordPress.com team to present the program at a regional event in Ciudad Real in June.

From there, a conversation that began with individual educators grew into something much bigger: an agreement that could make the program accessible across the region’s vocational education system.

A website students can take beyond the classroom

No matter where they’re starting from, WordPress.com gives students a place to build and publish on the web without requiring their schools to pay for hosting.

They can create websites for coursework, publish projects, experiment with ideas, and start building a portfolio they can take beyond the classroom.

Because WordPress is open source, students learn skills they can use well beyond the classroom. They can continue building websites for their studies, careers, businesses, or creative projects long after their courses end.

For vocational students in particular, that experience can have immediate practical value.

Whether they go on to work in web development, design, marketing, media, commerce, or another field entirely, knowing how to create and manage a web presence is an increasingly useful skill.

What changes for the region’s schools

Until now, schools in Castilla-La Mancha adopted WordPress.com one by one. Each institution or individual teacher had to discover the program and decide how it could fit into their teaching.

Now, instead of asking 40 vocational centers to find their way here independently, the regional government can introduce the Student plan across the system.

Teachers still decide how WordPress fits into their classrooms, but many more can start knowing the program is available to their students.

Having a place on the web that’s your own matters. This partnership gives students in Castilla-La Mancha the tools to turn their ideas into websites they can build, shape, and share. There’s a lot to learn from making something of your own, and this collaboration is another step toward bringing that kind of hands-on learning to more students around the world.

Rich Tabor – VP, Growth & Data at Automattic

This agreement shows what can happen when educators, regional leaders, and WordPress.com work together to give students professional tools.

Our goal is to help more educators introduce their students to the open web using the same tools trusted by professionals and businesses, while bridging the gap between learning and employment. This means developing in-demand digital skills, demonstrating them through real-world projects, and beginning to build a professional identity.

The Regional Government of Castilla-La Mancha is paving the way for a model we hope to expand to other regions: digital education that teaches students to create, publish, and actively participate on the web.

Building the next generation of the open web

An agreement like this is only the beginning.

Its real value will come from what students go on to make: a website they can share, a portfolio they can take to an interview, or a project they keep developing after the course ends.

We’re looking forward to seeing what comes out of classrooms across Castilla-La Mancha.

Educators, apply now to bring the Student plan to your class.

10 Nov 2026, 12:38 am

More and more, people don’t click through a list of links to find what they need. They ask an AI tool and get an answer built from content on sites like yours.

That raises important questions for anyone publishing online that didn’t exist a few years ago. Can people still find your site? When AI uses your work, does it know it’s yours? And do you get any say in it at all?

On WordPress.com, you own your site and your content.

Our new SEO tools bring your settings together in one place, with ways to set AI crawler preferences, identify your site and its authors, and spot missing SEO details.

Already on Premium, Business, or Commerce? Open your site’s dashboard and go to Jetpack → SEO to try the new tools.

Set your terms for AI crawlers

Some AI crawlers help AI tools answer questions and cite their sources. Others collect content to train AI models. You might welcome one and not the other.

Under Jetpack → SEO → GEO (generative engine optimization), you can set access preferences for individual supported crawlers.

Your choices go into your site’s robots.txt file, the established open protocol that sites use to tell crawlers what they can access. It’s then up to each AI platform to honor it.

You can also generate an llms.txt file – an optional summary of your site that some AI assistants use to find and understand your content.

Want to block AI training crawlers? Every WordPress.com site, on any plan, can do that today under Settings → Reading → Site Visibility, using “Prevent third-party sharing.” This asks known AI crawlers not to access your site. If this is turned on, it takes priority over your GEO tab choices for the crawlers it covers.

Help search engines recognize your work

Your name shouldn’t get lost when people discover your work.

Structured data (schema) helps with that: it’s a behind-the-scenes description of who runs a site and what each page is about. It used to mean writing code.

Now you add a few details about who runs your site, and WordPress.com adds structured data across your site. Bloggers and writers can also set up an author profile, which keeps their name attached to every post.

Find and fix SEO gaps in one place

Your SEO settings used to be spread across different screens. Now they live in one place: Jetpack › SEO.

Start with the Overview to see whether search engines can see your site, whether it’s verified, and which posts and pages need a better title or description. Then fix them in the Content tab, with a preview of how each appears in search, without opening every post.

You’ll also find title formats, your homepage description, canonical URLs, social previews, and your sitemap in the same place. It’s all built into WordPress.com, so there’s no separate SEO plugin to install. (You can still add an SEO plugin on any paid plan if you prefer.)

AI on your terms, starting now

The open web works best when the people behind the content can be found, recognized, and credited for their work. These tools are a step toward keeping it that way.

The new SEO tools are rolling out to WordPress.com sites on Premium, Business, and Commerce plans. Find them under Jetpack › SEO (previously Jetpack › Settings › Traffic).

On Free or Personal? From the same page, you can control whether search engines index your site and verify it with services like Google Search Console. Upgrade to Premium for the full toolkit.

Choose your site, head to Jetpack › SEO, and start by setting your preferences for AI crawlers.

4 Nov 2026, 4:33 pm

In WordPress Studio, a website starts as a conversation. You describe what you want, and an AI agent builds a first version for you. To change something, just tell the agent what you’d like instead.

If you’ve used an agentic coding tool recently, the latest version of WordPress Studio will feel familiar. You’ll find a chat next to a live preview of your site, a choice of models for each task, and the option to use your own API key or let WordPress.com handle it for you.

That’s WordPress Studio today: a free desktop app designed for modern workflows with support for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

How we got here

Back in August, the AI agent was added to WordPress Studio as a beta feature. It’s now at the center of the app, and what you told us during the beta period shaped how we rebuilt the workspace around it. Mostly, that meant making WordPress Studio simpler to navigate. Your sites and their chats live in one sidebar, site and app settings share a single Settings window, and the commands you used to hunt for are a keystroke away. WordPress Studio now feels less like a collection of features and more like one place to build your WordPress sites.

Prefer the terminal? The same agent is there too. Install the Studio CLI and run studio code to chat with it, or studio ui to open the full workspace in your browser.

The basics haven’t changed. You still build sites on your computer, share a preview link when you want feedback, and decide where your site lives when you’re ready.

Start with a direction

Finding the right look for a new site usually takes some back and forth, and the new design flow is built for exactly that. Ask the agent for a site, like “Build a site for my slow-fashion journal called Moire,” and it shows you four looks to choose from. Pick one, and it shows you four layouts in that style. Pick again, and it starts building.

If you already know what you want, describe the design in your request and the agent skips the questions. Either way, the agent saves the result as a design system: a DESIGN.md file in your site’s folder. Later chats follow it, so your site keeps a consistent look as it grows.

A smarter WordPress Studio agent

WordPress Studio Code is the WordPress harness behind the conversation, the tools and context the agent works with. It’s why the agent checks its blocks against the block editor before adding them to your site, and reviews its own work by taking screenshots. When you want to point at something specific, turn on Annotate, pin notes to elements in the preview, and send them to the agent all at once.

You also decide how much power each chat gets. With WordPress.com AI credits, pick Fast for everyday edits, Balanced for work that needs more careful reasoning, or Strong for complex, multi-step builds. Balanced and Strong now run on newer models. If you connect your own Anthropic API key, you choose the model directly, and support for other providers is on the way.

Whichever model you use, you can add custom instructions once in Settings → Instructions, such as “My sites are for restaurants,” and the agent follows them in every new chat.

Publish your site

WordPress Studio already lets you pull a connected WordPress.com or Pressable site down to your computer and push your changes back up. Now the agent works either way: build locally and push when you’re ready, or point it at your live site and let it make changes there directly.

Bring your own agent

Already building with another agent, like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor? Connect it to WordPress Studio through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Instructions are available in Settings → MCP. It works through the same WordPress harness as the built-in agent: the tools, the custom instructions, and the WordPress skills that know how to build, edit, and publish a site.

Everything within reach

The new navigation is built around the sites you work on most. Pin the ones you use often, pick up a recent chat right where you left off, and press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) to open the command palette and jump to any site, chat, or action.

You can also make the workspace your own. In Settings → Appearance, choose a light or dark theme, pick an accent color, and adjust how strongly it tints the interface and how much contrast there is between surfaces.

How we build now

More and more, building for the web means working alongside an AI agent: you describe what you want and watch your site take shape as you talk. WordPress Studio brings that way of working to WordPress, and we’re shipping updates faster than we ever have. It’s everything WordPress does well, with an agent that knows it inside and out, in one app you can download today.

Start your next project in the new workspace, and let us know what you think.

3 Nov 2026, 8:45 pm

Connecting your WordPress.com site to an AI has been possible for a while, but full access came with a paid plan. Now it’s open to free sites too for a limited time, through November. That means you can connect to the WordPress ChatGPT plugin or WordPress Claude connector once, then let your AI upload a post, clear out comments, or tell you what needs attention across all your sites.

The end of the year is when sites get busiest: holiday posts, seasonal promotions, year-end updates, and a long list of things you meant to finish before January. An AI can take a real chunk of that work off your plate right when you have the least time for it.

Connecting takes a couple of clicks, and once you’re connected, you can manage your site through a conversation. The WordPress plugin for ChatGPT and the Claude connector both run on MCP (Model Context Protocol), the open standard that lets AI tools work with your site, so you can manage it by just asking.

The problem: your site needs you everywhere

Running a site means a lot of small jobs. Log in, find the draft, fix the typo, approve the comments, check how last week’s post did. If you manage more than one site, you do all of that again somewhere else.

Most of this work isn’t hard. It just means opening a dashboard, hunting for the right screen, and clicking through it.

You already have an AI open for everything else, and now it can work on your sites.

How to connect

The WordPress ChatGPT plugin and Claude connector

1. Pick your AI (the easiest setup is with ChatGPT or Claude, but you can connect any agent that supports MCP).
2. Approve the connection when prompted.
3. Ask it something about your site.

That’s it. As soon as you connect, you can build and manage your site through a conversation with the AI you’re already using.

What it looks like in practice

Connect once, then ask in plain language. Each example below has a link that opens ChatGPT or Claude with the request already typed.

Start small: Not sure where to begin? Ask your AI to look at your site and tell you three things worth fixing this week. You can then review the list and work with your AI to address them together. Try in ChatGPT or try in Claude

Find your next post idea: Ask your AI to read your recent posts and suggest a few new ones that would resonate with your readers. You pick one and write it yourself. When it’s ready, ask your AI to save it to your site as a draft, so you can give it a final look and publish. Try in ChatGPT or try in Claude

Put your AI on a schedule: Set up a scheduled task, and your AI does the weekly chore you never get around to. For example, ask it to compare last week’s traffic to the week before, every Monday. You’ll get a report each week, so all you need to do is read it. Try in ChatGPT or try in Claude

Know what needs doing: Drafts to finish, comments waiting, pages to update. These are the jobs that never feel urgent, so they quietly pile up. Ask your AI for a to-do list and see it all in one place. Try in ChatGPT or try in Claude

Manage every site from one chat: Have more than one site? You don’t need a separate login for each. Ask once and work across all of them. Try in ChatGPT or try in Claude

You stay in control

Handing a task to an AI should never feel risky. Here you stay in control by choosing what it can do on each site and whether it asks before every change or goes ahead on its own.

Free through November

Through November, AI access is free for everyone, and it’s available on paid plans year-round. If you’ve been curious about running your site with AI, this is a great time to try as we enter the highest traffic weeks of the year.

Try it for a few weeks and see which jobs you stop doing by hand.

3 Nov 2026, 4:17 pm

As your business grows, you need your email to do more.

That’s why we’ve added two new plans to Professional Email on WordPress.com, powered by Titan: Plus and Ultra. They sit alongside Essential, the Professional Email you already know.

Professional Email Plus gives you more storage, stronger security, and time-saving tools that help you keep up with clients.

Professional Email Ultra goes further, helping you run more of your business from your inbox: clients can book time with you, you can send invoices and email campaigns, and AI helps you write replies faster.

Stay on Professional Email Essential for as long as it suits you, and when you’re ready for more, upgrading takes a click.

Essential: Put your business name on every email

Essential is the foundation: the same reliable Professional Email experience you already know, now with room to grow into Plus or Ultra when you need it.

It includes 30 GB of storage per mailbox, rich webmail, iOS and Android apps, and a built-in calendar and contacts. Two-factor authentication adds a layer of protection to every account.

You also get the everyday tools that make Professional Email worth using in the first place: multi-account support, undo send, block sender and allowlists, advanced anti-virus, grammar and spell check, and Turbo Search to find any message fast.

If you’re just getting your business email off the ground, Essential covers the basics without the extra cost.

Plus: Keep up with clients, with less email admin

Plus unlocks the features that growing teams ask for most. It’s built for businesses that have outgrown the basics and need their inbox to work harder.

Plus gives you 50 GB of storage per mailbox and tools for keeping up with client messages. Send as Alias lets you reply from a shared address without giving up your own identity.

Priority Inbox surfaces your most important messages automatically, and Business Auto-Reply keeps clients in the loop when you’re out.

It also adds small conveniences that save real time: Send Later for scheduling messages, Follow-up Reminders so nothing important slips through, and Auto Clean to keep your inbox tidy.

You also get unlimited email templates and contact groups, up from Essential. Team Chat and 1 GB of Titan Drive storage round it out for teams collaborating day to day.

Ultra: The full email toolkit for running your business

Ultra is for businesses that live in their email and want it to do more than send and receive. Storage jumps to 100 GB per mailbox, plus 50 GB of dedicated email backup and 50 GB of Titan Drive.

This is also where Professional Email goes beyond email and enhances your productivity. Appointment Bookings lets clients schedule appointments directly, Email Campaigns and Invoice Builder support sales and billing without a separate tool, and AI Write helps you compose and refine messages faster.

Signature Designer and Email Designer give your outgoing mail a more polished, on-brand look, and attachment and link tracking show you when a message actually lands.

Try Professional Email free

An inbox is more than a place to exchange emails. It’s where customer questions, new opportunities, and follow-ups happen.

Get three months of Professional Email free with a new domain or paid WordPress.com plan. Buy a new annual Business or Commerce plan and get a full year free on any Professional Email tier, including Ultra.

Already using Professional Email? Keep your current plan and price, and upgrade anytime from your Email Plan settings.

31 Oct 2026, 2:00 am

October 16 – October 29, 2026

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog! We shipped a lot of updates over these past two weeks. Here’s what’s new for you and your site:

Manage your site from your AI agent, free through November

On all paid plans, you’ve been able to connect an AI agent like ChatGPT or Claude to your WordPress.com account and manage your sites through conversation. Sites on our free plan can now also use this feature through November.

The easiest way to get started is to use our ChatGPT plugin or Claude connector and then ask it for help with building a site, making changes, or taking care of website chores.

Learn more in our support doc, Enable MCP tool access for AI agents.

Build stores with the WordPress Agent

Tell the WordPress Agent you want to sell something, and it’ll set up the store for you. It installs the WooCommerce plugin, designs a store layout, and adds example products to start from. Store building with AI works on all paid plans (and the Commerce plan includes valuable store add-ons like gift cards, product bundles, and shipment tracking).

Build with the WordPress Agent via our AI website builder.

Staging syncs tell you what’s happening

If you’ve started a staging sync and wondered whether it was working, this update is for you. While a sync runs, the site overview on your hosting dashboard shows a banner with its status. It says so when a sync is taking longer than usual, and when one looks stuck, it re-enables the Sync button so you can try again. If a sync fails, you get an email and a banner the next time you open your site, so you aren’t left waiting on a sync that won’t finish.

Staging sites also now tell search engines to stay away, so your test copy doesn’t show up in Google next to your real site. Staging is available on Business and Commerce plans.

Learn more in our support doc, Create a staging site.

More design control in the editor

You now have more ways to customize your pages, no custom code needed. For example, you can now set a minimum width or height in Button, Column, Gallery, and Heading blocks and add shadows to Button, Gallery, Media & Text, and Paragraph blocks.

Learn more about the updates to the editor in What’s new in Gutenberg 24.2.

WordPress 7.1.4 security release

WordPress 7.1.4 shipped October 28 with 13 security updates, tightening security for all WordPress users. Your WordPress.com site is already updated, so there’s nothing more you need to do to use the latest version.

Professional Email now comes with more powerful plans

A custom email address like hello@mygreatnewblog.com gives customers a name they recognize and trust. Now there are three Professional Email plans on WordPress.com, so your inbox can grow with you:

• Essential: 30 GB per mailbox with calendar, contacts, and spam protection. If you already had Professional Email, this is your plan with a new name.
• Plus: 50 GB per mailbox, plus scheduled sending and follow-up reminders.
• Ultra: 100 GB per mailbox, plus an AI email writer, appointment booking, email campaigns, and invoices.

You can find all the new email features here.

Fixes and improvements

We also shipped additional reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com, including:

• Making sure your first newsletter goes out when you add subscribers just before you publish.
• Showing the auto-renew switch only to the person who owns the purchase, so other admins no longer see a switch they can’t use.
• Fixing an issue where some posts failed to share to Threads.
• Fixing photos from phones and cameras that appeared rotated after upload.
• Fixing domain setup when you buy a domain first and a plan later. Your domain now becomes your site’s primary address automatically.
• Adding the option to use the www version of your domain, such as www.yourgroovydomain.com, as your site’s primary address, with a one-click switch back. (GitHub PR)
• Replacing the faded look of posts you’ve read in Reader with a small blue dot on unread posts, and adding a “Show read status” switch to your Reader settings. (GitHub PR)
• Fixing the new comment form: comments from signed-in readers no longer land in spam, undo no longer wipes what you’ve written, and the comment box stays readable on themes with dark color palettes. (GitHub PR)
• Explaining that only administrators can buy on the checkout “no access” page. (GitHub PR)
• Making checkout clearer: the card form now specifies which field is missing, and Apple Pay and Google Pay now show a more detailed price breakdown. (GitHub PR)

29 Oct 2026, 11:19 pm

Wide Margins: Unhurried conversations with thinkers, writers, and creators about what’s next. A series by WordPress.com.

Neal Stephenson has spent decades writing about what happens when engineering outpaces the people and institutions meant to steer it.

He joined us for the first public Wide Margins conversation on October 13, publication day for D: Heavy Water, the second book in his Bomb Light series.

We discussed the book, but also his fascination with ages of heroic engineering and the parallels between those times and today.

The thread running through the conversation was about how we control technology: who gets to shape it as it moves ahead, and how much understanding and choice do the rest of us retain?

The command line is back — but who’s in control?

We discussed his early essay, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. The command line, he observed, “is back.” It is how you work with tools like Claude Code. The difference is that “we’re spectators to it in a way.”

The essay was partly about open source and how much control we have over our computers. I asked how that idea holds up in a world of increasingly siloed ecosystems. Stephenson’s answer was unexpected: AI tools have brought the command line back, but can assemble commands so quickly that people can scarcely follow them.

It’s an unexpected role reversal: we have gained an extraordinarily capable tool, but the steps it takes can be harder to see.

The same question of control runs through Stephenson’s account of a far earlier technological race.

From tabletop to national secret, then and now

This past begins to rhyme with the present. Stephenson described the neutron experiments of the 1930s as “gentleman science” done on tabletops. In late 1938, Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch explained how the uranium nucleus had split.

Within months, the physics world understood what that meant. During World War II, nuclear research became a secret national priority.

When Neal started the Bomb Light series in 2012, the AI we have now was barely on the horizon.

He noted that the argument that we have to build it before our adversaries do is “sort of exactly where we are.” He hears the same logic in today’s AI race.

We discussed whether the outbreak of World War II, which turned nuclear physics into a focused, secret national priority, may have made it more containable. But much of today’s AI is already in public hands. As Stephenson put it, “nobody’s going to build a nuclear bomb in their garage.” The models, on the other hand, are already in the garage.

The problem of reality

Stephenson traces his attraction to stories of heroic engineering to growing up in Ames, Iowa, where scientists produced uranium metal for the Manhattan Project.

He also finds near-future science fiction harder to write, because things change too fast to project even a decade or two ahead.

Dystopia, he said, has become the default pose for writers, even though, in his view, life keeps improving generation after generation.

His two big worries remain carbon emissions, which he believes has technological fixes, and people’s failure to agree on what reality is, which has no obvious answer. He worries that bot farms deliberately drown out truth online to serve other agendas, making it harder to find.

The thinking he chooses not to outsource

He is using AI to write code but not to summarize his research. Reading sources, taking notes, and comparing them with old notes creates connections a summary never would.

Asked about brain-computer interfaces, he said they don’t interest him: translating thoughts into words is the point.

Stephenson is hardly rejecting new technology. He is making a choice about where it helps, and where he wants to do the thinking himself.

My full conversation with Neal Stephenson includes a reading from D: Heavy Water and more on science fiction, engineering, and the stories we tell about our future.

He’s now working on the third and likely final Bomb Light book. Expect it in two to three years.

Next on Wide Margins

Wide Margins is a WordPress.com series of live, unhurried conversations hosted by Alexander Rose, featuring writers, thinkers, and creators exploring what’s next.

Each conversation streams on YouTube, with recordings available afterward.

November 17, 2026: Worldbuilding in fiction
Hugh Howey, author of the Silo series, on experimenting with worlds in the alternate present and possible futures.

January 12, 2027
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible.