WordPress.com Changelog: Premium Themes on Paid Plans and an Upgraded Newsletter Hub

By WordPress.com Staff on October 16, 2026

October 2 – 15, 2026

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog! WordPress.com premium themes are now included on all paid plans, your comment form automatically takes on your site’s look, and your newsletter has a new home base.

Premium themes for all

Premium WordPress.com themes used to only be available on the Premium plan and above, but now they’re included on the Personal plan, too.

Check out our available themes, and if you can’t find one you like, you can upload your own on any paid plan.

A comment form that looks like your site

Your comment box now picks up your theme’s fonts and colors, so it’s more naturally integrated into your site’s look and feel without any extra effort.

A styled comment form on a WordPress.com site

A new overview for your newsletter

We’ve shipped a few updates to your newsletter experience on WordPress.com.

First up: if you’re in your dashboard and open Jetpack → Newsletter, you’ll now see a new Overview tab.

You’ll see a short checklist to help you get your newsletter set up: add a subscribe form, add your first subscribers, and send your first newsletter. Each step checks itself off when you do it.

Once your newsletter is up and running, this page will show your total and paid subscribers, open and click rates, a subscribers chart with a comparison period, and how your recent posts performed.

Want a fun little reminder that your list is growing? Turn on subscriber alerts in your notification settings, and your dashboard plays a chime and pulses the notification bell each time someone new joins your list.

As a reminder, every WordPress.com plan comes with a newsletter. It’s a great way to build an audience you own, strengthen relationships with your readers, and keep them coming back to your site.

WordPress 7.1.3 security release

WordPress 7.1.3 shipped October 6, and your WordPress.com site is up to date. We update your site for you, so there’s nothing you need to do to be running the latest and greatest.

Fixes and improvements

We’ve shipped additional reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com, including:

Making sure everyone who buys a paid newsletter tier joins your subscriber list, including past buyers who had been missed.
Stopping subscriber emails from going out when you restore an old post from the trash.
Explaining what went wrong in site-down alert emails, with a summary of the issue and a link to learn more.
Fixing a bug that sent followers duplicate emails when a comment was unapproved and approved again.
Hiding sites you’ve already dismissed from Reader Discover recommendations.
Asking you to reconnect Google Photos when Google rejects access, instead of failing quietly.
Adding an All Playlists block that shows every video playlist on your site as a gallery or a list, plus a description field for each playlist. (GitHub PR)
Adding a Latest Videos Playlist block that always plays your newest videos, and a “Show player” option on both playlist blocks so you can show just the list of videos. (GitHub PR)
Letting you reopen a live chat with support after refreshing the page. (GitHub PR)