WordPress.com’s Year in Review

All our highlights from 2023.

December 29, 2023

Jeremy Anderberg

Our team here at WordPress.com, comprised of hundreds of people spread across the entire globe, accomplished a lot in 2023. On the blog, we published over 90 posts, from product upgrades, to brand new features, and even new additions to the Automattic family of products.

If you missed anything, here’s a recap of this year’s most important launches, announcements, and new features.

Table of Contents

  1. 2023 Video Recap
  2. An all-new mobile experience
  3. Launch your newsletter, from any plan
  4. Ignite your growth with Blaze
  5. ActivityPub for WordPress joins the Automattic family
  6. Happy 20th anniversary, WordPress!
  7. Revamp your site seamlessly with staging sites
  8. A tour of the all-new Stats page
  9. Custom theme designs just got easier
  10. Managing and purchasing domains on WordPress.com has never been better
  11. One inbox to rule them all
  12. The all-new WordPress.com learning hub
  13. Jetpack’s AI Assistant is here to help
  14. Continuous site editing, writing, and design improvements
  15. All. The. Themes.

2023 Video Recap

An all-new mobile experience

This year the Jetpack mobile app has made huge strides as the preferred mobile experience for WordPress.com customers. The team is continuously improving the app, making publishing, reading, and monitoring engagement easier than ever. If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the time!

Launch your newsletter, from any plan

Newsletters on WordPress.com have seen a huge number of improvements in 2023—from features like paid subscriptions on any plan and the introduction of a Paywall Block, to fresh resources like our Newsletters 101 course. No matter how you want to reach your audience, WordPress.com has you covered. Get started here.

Ignite your growth with Blaze

Early in the year, we launched Blaze—our self-serve advertising tool. This cool new feature allows anyone with a WordPress blog to advertise on WordPress.com and Tumblr in just a few clicks. How? By turning your site content into clean, compelling ads that run across our millions-strong network of blogs. Here are 5 tips for making the most of your ads.

ActivityPub for WordPress joins the Automattic family

This innovative plugin brings a whole new level of social networking to your website by integrating it with the wider federated social web. When installed, the plugin allows you to easily share your content and interact with users on Mastodon and other platforms that also support the ActivityPub protocol. Just as Automattic aims to do with all of our products, this plugin helps to decentralize the web, break down silos, and foster a more connected online ecosystem. Click here to learn more about getting started with ActivityPub for WordPress.

Happy 20th anniversary, WordPress!

On May 27, 2003, co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little announced that WordPress was available to the public. Their vision, as you can still read in their original post on WordPress.org, was to foster a means by which anyone could easily share and discuss their ideas with the world. What started as a humble open-source blogging platform is now the driving force behind over one-third of the internet’s most popular websites, including The New York Times, Salesforce, and Disney. 

Revamp your site seamlessly with staging sites

In May, we announced the availability of staging sites, which made it easy to experiment with changes to your site. A few months later, we added to its capabilities with a synchronization feature that allows you to push changes from your staging site to your live, or “production,” site. You can now fearlessly try out new ideas and designs before publishing them to the world.

For all the developers and professional site creators out there, we’ve also launched SSH and WP-CLI access, site preview links, and global edge caching. Be sure to stay up to date with these technical tools at our WordPress.com Develop Blog.

A tour of the all-new Stats page

In addition to launching a new and improved mobile app, our intrepid Jetpack team also made significant changes to the Stats page. This all-new experience enhances your ability to analyze and optimize your site’s content. We’ve restructured the layout in a friendlier way, introduced new modules that reveal crucial data points, and revamped the overall look of this powerful analytics tool. Check it out for yourself.

Custom theme designs just got easier

Whether you want a simple blog that highlights recent posts, a visually stunning portfolio, or an online home for your small business, your website should be just as unique as you are. Our new site design tool guides you through the process of creating a memorable custom homepage, utilizing a library of hundreds of patterns, colors, and fonts that you can mix and match for whichever distinctive vibe you’re going for. Try it out for yourself right here.

Managing and purchasing domains on WordPress.com has never been better

Your domain is the lifeblood of your online presence. This year, we’ve been hard at work building a number of exciting features to ensure a world-class domain name experience on WordPress.com whether you have one domain or one hundred. We’ve introduced an all-new domains-focused dashboard, multi-year registrations, domain forwarding, convenient transfer, simple DNS imports, and more. Oh, by the way, if you’re coming from Google Domains, we’ll cover your transfer fees. Grab your piece of online real estate today.

One inbox to rule them all

In October, Automattic welcomed Texts.com to our growing family. This handy app brings all your chats into a single dashboard: iMessage, Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, Messenger, LinkedIn, Signal, Discord, and X, with more services on the way.  Beyond the unmatched convenience, Texts.com also offers end-to-end encryption, as well as some delightful features that other messaging apps can’t seem to figure out, like scheduling messages to send when your recipient is awake, or the ability to mark as unread on services that still don’t have it. Sign up today. (Psst, be sure to check back for news on the iOS app!)

The all-new WordPress.com learning hub

Our incredible design and education teams moved all of our learning resources—courses, webinars, tutorials, forums, and more—into one convenient and beautifully-designed place at WordPress.com/learn. Our mission with the learning hub is to have one spot for all your WordPress.com questions and learning opportunities. Spend some time with this resource center and come away more confident than ever.

Jetpack’s AI Assistant is here to help

Jetpack AI Assistant is seamlessly integrated as a block within the WordPress.com editor. Whether you’re checking your spelling and grammar, need ideas for better titles or headings, or simply in need of an outline for your great idea, this incredible feature can help jumpstart your creativity. Give it a shot in the editor today by using the AI Assistant Block.

Continuous site editing, writing, and design improvements

WordPress is constantly improving and making it easier than ever to write, publish, and design your site. This year, we’ve seen the addition of the Details Block, footnotes, distraction-free mode, a style book (which lets you preview design variations), customizable button styles, sticky headers, Openverse integration, the Time to Read Block, and so much more.

All. The. Themes.

Our amazing themes design team released more themes in 2023 than any previous year in our history. Whether you’re a business owner, a community leader, a hobbyist, a blogger, or anything in between, you’re guaranteed to find a theme that matches the vision you have for your website. Check out the entire theme showcase to get a peek at the incredible variety of our design offerings. And there’s plenty more to come in 2024 and beyond; if you’re looking for something specific and can’t find it, let us know in the comments.

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50 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. Edward Academy Dec 29th at 4:13 pm

    I am grateful 🙏 to everyone for the great support you have provided for a bright future and a decent life and I wish you all a happy year 🥳 and we achieve success and success thank you for the size of heaven and earth

    Liked by 6 people

  2. M Sohaib Mujahid Dec 29th at 5:03 pm

    Hve a good experiance

    Liked by 1 person

  3. christinenovalarue Dec 29th at 6:38 pm

    🧡

    Liked by 2 people

  4. Tigerman Dec 29th at 8:40 pm

    This is all very good, but After one week, I am still waiting for your team to complete the transfer of my domain, colinguestauthor.com to my WordPress website. I look forward to hearing from you that this has been done. Best regards Colin Guest

    Liked by 1 person

  5. peterfitzmichael Dec 29th at 10:00 pm

    Congratulations! Keep up the strides on improvements.

    Liked by 2 people

  6. Rich Gillette Dec 30th at 1:11 am

    Great read

    Liked by 1 person

  7. decemaeg Dec 30th at 3:31 am

    Thank you

    Liked by 1 person

  8. decemaeg Dec 30th at 3:32 am

    Thank you sir kap 🥰

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Teslim Oyegbemiga Dec 30th at 3:52 am

    Great!!

    Liked by 2 people

  10. truthinmaincom Dec 30th at 5:42 am

    Thanks to the WP team for the 2023 Review of my Blog. It’s a commendable compendium.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. aaazzracheelle Dec 30th at 5:53 am

    Nice

    Liked by 2 people

  12. raymondptl Dec 30th at 8:17 am

    please unsubscribe me from your mailing list

    Liked by 2 people

  13. dinhkhactung1986hp Dec 30th at 8:31 am

    Good

    Liked by 2 people

  14. dragangaga50 Dec 30th at 11:48 am

    da li je spreman pocetak

    Liked by 3 people

  15. 7FigureMachine Dec 30th at 11:49 am

    ❤️

    Liked by 3 people

  16. Don Bowen Dec 30th at 12:36 pm

    I agree. Foremost should be policies that ensure 24/7/365 reliable, low cost, energy.

    Liked by 2 people

  17. GABRIELA HERNANDEZ Dec 30th at 5:32 pm

    thanks for the update!

    Liked by 7 people

  18. JenT Dec 31st at 6:55 am

    So much WordPress goodness over 2023. Thank you for all the new features! Can’t wait to see what 2024 brings (and hoping that will include a WordPress.com Mastodon account to follow)!

    Liked by 9 people

  19. I A Soomro Jan 2nd at 8:25 pm

    Good job

    Liked by 1 person

  20. FOCUS Jan 2nd at 8:36 pm

    good

    Liked by 1 person

  21. The Landscaping guy Jan 2nd at 11:57 pm

    This is great.Really struggling on changing my menu to perfection.Any insights you may want to share

    Like

  22. bmalzard Jan 3rd at 12:21 am

    Hi Jeremy, happy new year. I have been blogging with WordPress for a few years and have found it excellent to use. I currently can’t use it as my system requires OS X 10.13 or later. I don;t know how to get this so do I need to start a new blog? Any advice would be helpful.

    Like

    • supernovia Jan 3rd at 7:30 pm

      Hey there, are you able to use WordPress.com from a browser? Or, do you do prefer to use the Jetpack app from a mobile device or desktop?

      Like

  23. dakota12253 Jan 3rd at 6:14 am

    why cant i get into [redacted] after the first of the year never had to have a log in before

    Like

  24. ruedigersteinbeck1 Jan 3rd at 9:30 am

    Translationen in german

    Like

  25. michaeld737df98ad Jan 3rd at 12:17 pm

    WP’s biggest action of the year was incorporating ActivityPub. We eagerly await rollout of that functionality on Reader.

    Like

  26. morison Jan 3rd at 1:45 pm

    Nice review

    Like

  27. Md.Ali Hosen Jan 3rd at 1:58 pm

    thanks

    Like

  28. delzellmarlin Jan 3rd at 2:39 pm

    Great products

    Liked by 4 people

  29. aspimom Jan 4th at 5:55 am

    I’ve only been writing my blog since the end of November but I can say so far that people have welcomed me. I like WordPress and now have somewhat gotten used to it. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  30. hakeem Hammad khan Jan 4th at 6:33 am

    I would like to say thank you to this product, and we got a lot of help from this product.

    Liked by 4 people

  31. maxwellgava Jan 5th at 9:03 am

    A great Product, I started my Posting Mid December 2023. Hope to make big changes this year

    Liked by 2 people

  32. rljpdx Jan 5th at 9:50 am

    I like wordpress.com because it’s a great place to start getting people to actually look at your site and consume some content.

    Liked by 2 people

  33. collinsmenegbo32 Jan 5th at 11:27 am

    I appreciate you all

    Liked by 2 people

  34. Divinejhonlee Jan 5th at 12:09 pm

    I would like to say thank you to this product.

    Liked by 1 person

  35. EPL Jan 7th at 7:17 am

    With me am still stuck😕😕

    Like

  36. Rabail Jan 7th at 11:06 am

    Thank you for giving this opportunity to write about our demons

    Like

  37. Daniel Wilson Jan 8th at 7:49 am

    Thanku for sharing valuable info

    Liked by 1 person

  38. digitaleminent7 Jan 10th at 6:07 am

    👍

    Liked by 1 person

  39. aarashid Jan 10th at 10:52 am

    You are welcome

    Liked by 3 people

  40. himanshukushwah8650 Jan 12th at 9:06 am

    🙂

    Liked by 2 people

  41. kevinfox123 Jan 13th at 8:02 am

    good

    Liked by 1 person

  42. Evans Mwape Jan 19th at 10:40 am

    This is good

    Liked by 3 people

  43. MC Solution BD Jan 20th at 11:18 am

    good job!

    Liked by 2 people

  44. Saeed ulhassan Jan 21st at 6:20 pm

    The power of ‘W’

    Liked by 3 people

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