What's New on WordPress.com: Tools to Make Designing Your Site Easier Than Ever

Jeremy Anderberg

Feb 1

At WordPress.com, we're always adding features and pushing our blocks and Site Editor to do more so that you can create, design, and publish amazing things with ease. Our newest features are largely design-focused, giving you the confidence to explore a variety of styles and then easily apply them across your entire site.

Let's jump in and see what's new.

Browse Mode: An easier way to navigate the Site Editor

Browse Mode allows you to easily explore, navigate, and edit your site's templates and template parts, including adding new templates right from this interface. To play around with Browse Mode, simply click your site's icon from the Site Editor.

When to use this feature: You want to see how all the pieces of your site fit together — and to jump between your templates and template parts for easy editing.

Clearer access to your advanced block settings

With more powerful blocks comes the need for easier, more intuitive access to advanced settings for those blocks. To that end, we've split block settings into two tabs within the sidebar. On the left side, you'll find standard customization options like color, typography, and spacing. On the right side, you'll find more advanced options, like layouts, custom CSS, and a button to apply changes across your entire site (more on that below).

When to use this feature: You're working on your navigation menu and need more customization than just color or typography options. Go over to advanced settings to change the orientation of the menu from horizontal to vertical — among other things!

Preview style options with the Style Book

A number of themes, including staff favorite Twenty Twenty Three, now come with styles, which change the look and feel of your site — color, spacing, etc. — within the overarching design aesthetic of the theme.

With the newly launched Style Book, you can now see how various styles affect different blocks. You're able to preview colors, typography, embeddable media, and more.

When to use this feature: You're curious about switching up the colors or typography on your site, but you want to know what it'll look like, especially within specific blocks, before committing.

Apply design changes across your entire site

When working and designing in the Site Editor, it's easy to find yourself having created a certain style that you really like and want emulated across your entire site. With our new "Apply globally" button, you can do just that.

When to use this feature: You've spent some time styling a heading (or other block) on your homepage or a page template, and you want that look to carry over across all the headings (or whichever block you're working with) on your site.