Kraków recap, WooCommerce new update drops, hosting benchmarks return.
Hello WordPressers!
Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup — WP More newsletter issue 44, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.
This week had a lot going on.
WordCamp Europe wrapped up in Kraków with nearly 2,500 attendees and a keynote from CERN. WooCommerce dropped version 10.8. WordPress’s market share slide hit six months in a row. The Core team kicked off a community testing push for real-time collaboration in 7.1. And Review Signal published its first hosting benchmarks in three years.
Plenty to catch up on.
In this issue:
- WordCamp Europe 2026 wrapped up in Kraków with 2,458 attendees from 81 countries
- WooCommerce 10.8 ships with storefront performance improvements and a new offline-aware admin
- WordPress market share drops for the sixth consecutive month, now at 41.9%
- The Core team launches a community outreach program to test real-time collaboration for WordPress 7.1
- Review Signal’s 2026 WordPress hosting benchmarks are back after a three-year gap
WordCamp Europe 2026 brought 2,458 people to Kraków
WordCamp Europe 2026 ran June 4–6 in Kraków, pulling in 2,458 attendees from 81 countries, about a quarter of them first-timers. The schedule packed in 49 talks and eight workshops across tracks covering core development, AI, and business.
Contributor Day kicked things off with teams spread across Polyglots, Core, Performance, Plugins, and more, with onboarding support for newcomers. The opening keynote came from CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, who explained why they chose WordPress to carry their web presence forward.
There’s a lot more from Kraków worth reading about: the talks, the after-party, the community moments.
Read the full blog on Official blog here.
Now over to the product side of things, where WooCommerce pushed out a notable new release this week.
WooCommerce 10.8 ships with faster storefronts and an offline-aware admin
WooCommerce 10.8 dropped May 26, built by 67 contributors across 176 pull requests. First thing to check: it now requires WordPress 6.9 or higher, so update that before anything else.
The headline changes are a new offline-aware admin (no more silent save failures when your connection drops), UI alignment with WordPress 7.0 styling, and storefront performance improvements including a smoother Add to Cart flow. There’s also a database update in this release, so read the notes before you hit update.
For the full breakdown of what changed, including API updates and the beta-to-release differences, the release notes have everything.
Read the full blog on Official blog here.
While WooCommerce keeps shipping improvements, the broader WordPress platform picture looks a bit more complicated.
WordPress market share is down for the sixth month in a row
W3Techs data reported by Search Engine Journal puts WordPress at 41.9% of all websites as of late May 2026, down from 43.2% in December 2025. That 1.3 percentage point drop over six months is more than double what the platform lost across all of 2025.
WordPress still leads the CMS market by a wide margin (59.4% among sites with a known CMS), and the nearest rival Shopify sits near 5.2%. But the pace of decline is accelerating, and the timing lines up with the Automattic-WP Engine fallout plus growing interest in developer-focused alternatives like Astro.
Whether this is a blip or a real shift is the question everyone’s asking. The full article digs into the data.
Read the full blog on Official blog here.
Meanwhile, the people building WordPress core are focused on what comes next and they need your help testing it.
WordPress 7.1 wants you to test real-time collaboration
Real-time collaboration was cut from WordPress 7.0 last month over concerns about race conditions, server load, and recurring bugs. Now the Core team is setting it up properly for 7.1, with a proposed release date of August 19, 2026.
They’ve launched a community outreach effort, modeled on the old FSE experiment to get early adopters testing the feature in real-world conditions before Beta 1 on July 15. They’re looking for regular editors, professional teams (newsrooms, agencies, small businesses), and web hosts willing to recruit their customers. The goal isn’t just bug reports, they want honest feedback on what the experience actually feels like.
If you’ve been curious about collaborative editing, this is your window to shape it.
Read the full blog on Official blog here.
And wrapping up this week’s main stories, we’ve got something for everyone who’s ever agonized over a hosting decision.
WordPress hosting benchmarks are back after three years
Review Signal’s Kevin Ohashi just published his 2026 WordPress and WooCommerce hosting benchmarks, the first since 2023. The three-year gap had a reason: when Grafana Labs acquired k6, running the benchmarks on Grafana Cloud would’ve cost around $250,000 in virtual user fees. So Ohashi built his own open source load testing platform, Orderly Ape, from scratch. That took three years.
The 2026 results cover five WordPress price tiers (under $25/month up to $500+ enterprise) plus a WooCommerce tier, with updated tooling and methodology. One caveat: year-over-year comparisons with past editions need careful handling due to infrastructure changes.
Which hosts came out on top? You’ll want to read the full report for that.
Read the full report on The Repository here.
Other reports from The Repository you might like to read:
- Contributors Launch FSE-Style Outreach Program to Get Real-Time Collaboration Ready for WordPress 7.1
- Gutenberg 23.3 Ships Experimental Customizable WordPress Dashboard
- WordPress.org Overhauls 20-Year-Old Jobs Board, Adds Career Features to Profiles
Don’t forget to subscribe & support them, they do some amazing hard-hitting WordPress journalism.
WordPress Must Read
→ 2026 WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (wphostingbenchmarks.com)
→ Protect The Shire (wordpress.org)
→ WordPress powers 33% of the web in 2026 (down from 36% at its peak): CMS market share report (gravitykit.com)
→ Malware Targeting WordPress Abuses Steam Community Profiles for Command & Control Operations (godaddy.com)
→ Quarterly WordPress Threat Intelligence Report – Q1 2026 (wordfence.com)
On other WordPress News
→ WooCommerce 10.8.1: Dot Release (developer.woocommerce.com)
→ Monthly Education Buzz Report – May 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ Help Core help test Real Time Collaboration (make.wordpress.org)
→ What’s new in Gutenberg 23.3? (03 Jun) (make.wordpress.org)
→ Help test new career functionality on WordPress.org (make.wordpress.org)
→ wpcontributordashboard.org revamped and launched (wpcontributordashboard.org)
→ Welcome Estela as a team rep (make.wordpress.org)
→ Expanding Abilities across WooCommerce Extensions (developer.woocommerce.com)
→ The product editor beta is being retired in WooCommerce 11.0 (developer.woocommerce.com)
→ Automattic Joins the Tech Coalition (automattic.com)
→ Call for WordCamp Europe Host City 2028 (europe.wordcamp.org)
→ SiteGround Faces Backlash After Automatically Installing AI Plugin on Customer Sites (wp-content.co)
From WordPress Community
→ Arundhati Kane receives the Yoast Care fund for her contribution to the WordPress community (yoast.com)
→ Little Big Things for WordPress Editing (richtabor.com)
→ 1 Million Forced Installs and a 1-Star Rating: Inside SiteGround’s AI Plugin Rollout (wpmayor.com)
→ Kadence Is Now Liquid Web: My Honest Take on the Rebrand (diydreamsite.com) → Speaking at WP Accessibility Day (wpaccessibility.day)
→ AI Workflows for WordPress and WooCommerce: Live Event (developer.woocommerce.com)
Conclusion
That’s Issue 44 wrapped up. It’s been a big week, a packed WordCamp in Kraków, a solid WooCommerce release, some sobering market share numbers, a community call to help shape the next version of WordPress, and the long-awaited return of hosting benchmarks. A lot to take in, but that’s WordPress for you.
Thanks for reading WP More; if you found this useful, share it with a WordPress friend.
Nishat, WP More
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