WordPress 7.0 Was Supposed to Launch This Month. The Delay Is Good News.

I have pushed a major WordPress update to a batch of client sites in one afternoon without staging. It was years ago. No staging environment, no staggered rollout, just the update button and a cup of coffee going cold beside me. By evening, two sites showed white screens, one had a broken WooCommerce checkout, and a Waterford manufacturer was on the phone asking why his entire product catalogue had disappeared from the front end. The plugin powering it had not been tested against the new core version. The fix took three hours and cost him an evening's worth of online orders.

I think about that afternoon every time WordPress announces a major release. So when the core team announced on 31 March that version 7.0, originally scheduled for 9 April 2026, would be delayed by several weeks, my first reaction was not frustration.

It was relief.

What Happened with WordPress 7.0

WordPress 7.0 was set to be the biggest release in years. The headline feature is real-time collaboration, letting multiple users edit the same post simultaneously with live cursors and automatic conflict resolution. The underlying technology is Yjs, a conflict-free replicated data type library. Same approach that powers Figma and Notion. Ambitious, genuinely useful, and technically demanding.

The problem, as the Make WordPress Core blog documented, was architectural. The original implementation stored collaborative editing events in WordPress's existing post meta system. At the frequency real-time editing demands, the very caching layers that keep WordPress pages fast were being overwhelmed, triggering cascading invalidation storms. The database choked under rapid-fire sync operations.

Rather than ship a feature that works in controlled testing but buckles under the traffic that over 600 million WordPress sites would generate, the core team pulled back. Release lead Matias Ventura described the timeline as "weeks, not months," with a revised schedule expected by 22 April and the final release likely arriving in late May.

That is the right call. A platform that powers roughly 43% of the world's websites, as W3Techs reports, cannot afford to ship instability. When a business website breaks after an update, the owner does not see a CRDT sync failure. They see a site that will not load and customers who leave.

The PHP Requirement You Need to Know About

Buried beneath the collaboration headlines is a change that matters more to most business owners right now: WordPress 7.0 drops support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3. The new minimum is PHP 7.4.

The WordPress Core team reported that combined usage of PHP 7.2 and 7.3 has fallen below 4% of monitored installations. Small number. But if your site is in that 4%, this is the single most important detail in the entire release. Your site will stay on the WordPress 6.9 branch. No new features. Eventually, slower security patching. And there is no workaround. If your hosting environment still runs PHP 7.2 or 7.3, your provider needs to upgrade it before 7.0 arrives.

On Web60's managed WordPress infrastructure, PHP versions are maintained as part of the platform, alongside Nginx, Redis, and the full hosting stack. No action required from you.

What Real-Time Collaboration Actually Means for Your Business

When 7.0 does arrive, real-time collaboration will be genuinely useful for any business where more than one person touches the website. Picture a solicitor's firm in Sligo where the office manager updates case studies while the partner rewrites the services page. No more locked posts. No more "someone else is editing this" warnings. Two people, one editor, changes syncing live.

For sole traders managing their own sites, the feature is less immediately relevant. And for teams already running content workflows through Google Workspace or Notion, the built-in WordPress collaboration may not replace those tools overnight. WordPress has been a single-editor environment for over two decades. Trust in a new collaborative system builds with use, not announcements.

But the direction matters. WordPress is closing the feature gap with tools businesses already rely on for team editing. For the performance and reliability that a modern WordPress stack delivers, adding native collaboration is the natural next step.

What to Do Before 7.0 Arrives

If you are on managed WordPress hosting, your provider handles the transition. They test the update in staging, verify plugin compatibility, and roll it out once everything checks clean. That is the entire value. Someone else absorbs the risk of major version transitions so you do not end up with a white screen and a ringing phone.

If you manage your own installation, two things before May. First, verify your PHP version. If it is below 7.4, talk to your host now. Second, make sure you can test updates in staging before pushing to production. Major releases are not the time for confidence. They are the time for the kind of caution that WordPress itself just demonstrated.

The platform that powers your business website chose careful over fast. That is the instinct you want from the software running your shop front.

Sources

• WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1 Delayed, Make WordPress Core
• WordPress Delays Release of Version 7.0 to Focus on Stability, Search Engine Journal
• Dropping Support for PHP 7.2 and 7.3, Make WordPress Core
• WordPress Usage Statistics, W3Techs
• Building a Custom Sync Provider for Real-Time Collaboration, Make WordPress Core