Scroll effects in CSS come as four separate features, and they ship at different times in different browsers. I go through which one fits a progress bar, a sticky header, a reveal, and a page fade, and where the fallbacks still need JavaScript.
The June 2026 WordPress performance chat spent most of its time on cross-document view transitions for the frontend. The tickets say a lot about where core is heading, and you can already test the one-line opt-in on a client site.
The CSS @function at-rule is here, and the loud take is that it replaces Sass. It doesn’t, quite: the function body follows the cascade, ordering matters, and unsupported browsers drop your declaration. Here’s how I’d use it on a theme today.
Antoine Villepreux removed the last JavaScript from a CSS pie chart on CSS-Tricks. The trick worth taking isn’t the missing script, it’s putting the values on the parent and computing slice offsets there. Here’s how I’d do the same loop in PHP so every browser gets the chart.
The thumbnail-to-hero morph dies the moment a product renders twice on one page. Here is how I’d name elements on a WooCommerce grid, either from the template or at click time, and how to keep the CSS down to three rules.
Agencies pay for hosting on pages that need no PHP: microsites, docs, spec demos, status pages. Those can move to free static hosting, and WordPress content sites can be exported to it. Here is where the line sits, and where WooCommerce ends the conversation.
Custom media queries let you name a breakpoint once and use it everywhere, but native @custom-media support is still limited. This is how I compare the browser rule against a PostCSS build step before putting either on a WordPress or WooCommerce site.
::search-text lets you style what Ctrl+F highlights, but the browser default is hard to beat. Here’s how I compare it with ::selection and the Custom Highlight API, and what I’d ship on blogs, stores and docs sites.
The fly-to-cart animation on most WooCommerce stores drags in a whole JavaScript library for one curve. CSS offset-path does it in a few lines, if you handle two traps: dead motion-* properties from the old spec, and pixel-based paths that break on small screens.
WordPress has no Markdown parser in core, so the rendering is always yours to wire up. The tempting shortcut is to echo the parsed HTML straight out. On a WordPress site that string usually comes from user input, so it needs wp_kses before it reaches the page.