WordPress 7.0 Delayed - What It Means for Your Maintenance Strategy

WordPress 7.0 was supposed to ship on April 9, 2026. That's no longer happening. On March 31, Matias Ventura announced on Make WordPress Core that the release is being pushed back by several weeks. No new date has been set yet. This isn't the first delay in the 7.0 cycle - Beta 1 was already postponed in February due to unit test failures, and RC1 was delayed in March over performance concerns. But this time, the delay is architectural, not just a schedule slip. What's causing the delay The core issue is Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) - a feature that introduces live co-editing in the WordPress block editor, similar to what Google Docs offers. Building this requires a new database table, changes to how WordPress handles editing sessions, and a rethinking of how post caches work during active collaboration. The team realized that the database schema needed more design work before being locked into a major release. Key concerns raised by contributors: **Performance: **real-time editing cu