WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1 has slipped, and I am glad it has. It was due today. The core team moved it to March 24, 2026. Anyone who has watched a site fall over because of a premature “performance enhancement” will take a four-day delay without complaining. I have spent enough nights refactoring broken checkouts to put stability ahead of the ship date.
The performance bottlenecks holding up RC1
This is a technical hold rather than an administrative one. The concerns raised were about Real Time Collaboration performance and Client-side Media image optimization. Shipping something as heavy as real-time collaboration means more than extra database writes. It means race conditions and a transients load that can flatten a shared host.
The release package size is getting attention too. The WordPress bloat argument has been running for years, and the core team finally looks to be asking properly what belongs in the zip file. If you manage hundreds of sites through WP-CLI, every megabyte shows up in a mass update.
Handling experimental features safely
Testing the 7.0 branch early takes more than optimism. You want a way to switch features on and off while they are still half-baked. The new client-side media processing takes real load off the server CPU, and it will bite you if your frontend scripts are not wired up for it. That got a long discussion in Gutenberg issue #74333.
<?php
/**
* Safely check if we're on the WordPress 7.0 RC or higher
* to enable specific performance debugging for collaboration features.
*/
function bbioon_check_core_version_safety() {
global $wp_version;
// Only run this logic if we are specifically testing the 7.0 RC branch
if ( version_compare( $wp_version, '7.0-RC1', '>=' ) ) {
// Log potential performance bottlenecks in the new collaboration API
add_action( 'wp_footer', function() {
if ( is_user_logged_in() && current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) {
echo '<!-- WP 7.0 RC Debug: Collaboration Hooks Active -->';
}
});
}
}
add_action( 'init', 'bbioon_check_core_version_safety' );I wrote recently about preparing for WordPress 7.0 and the PHP version drop, and this delay backs up what I said there: 7.x is the biggest architectural change since the REST API landed in core. If you deal with update regressions, you already know the client-side shift for media is the sort of change that breaks custom image filters.
What this means for developers
The extra days give everyone time to read the Real Time Collaboration pull request. Go and read it if you have not. The state synchronization is good work. Whether it holds up in a high-concurrency environment is the open question, and that is where the bottleneck would show up first.
If this WordPress 7.0 Release Candidate 1 work is eating your dev hours, hand it to me. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Where that leaves us
Core is never really finished, but shipping a broken RC is a mess the whole plugin ecosystem ends up paying for. So the delay gets my support. The platform is turning into a real-time application framework, and that shift earns this kind of caution. Watch your dev environments, next Tuesday is a big day.
