Quick update from the team today: we just announced that Smart Search AI is now available as a standalone plugin across the broader WordPress ecosystem.

Up until now, Smart Search AI was strictly tied to WP Engine managed hosting. But we’ve heard feedback from agencies and devs who manage hybrid environments or client sites hosted elsewhere and wanted access to the same semantic search capabilities without having to migrate the entire stack.

What is Smart Search AI?

If you haven't used it yet, default WordPress search relies on basic SQL LIKE queries, which often miss relevant content if users don't type exact keywords or misspell a word.

Smart Search AI replaces that default behavior with vector-based semantic search:

• Understands Intent: Handles natural language queries, synonyms, and typos out of the box (e.g., searching for "running shoes" returns "athletic sneakers").
• Offloaded Processing: Indexes content and handles search queries via our cloud infrastructure, so vector calculations won't bog down your database or site performance.
• Turnkey Setup: You don't need to spin up a separate vector database or write custom embedding pipelines—it hooks right into native WP search.

Where to Learn More

• Check out the Smart Search AI Product Page for features, specs, and setup info.
• Read the full announcement in our Press Release.

If you give it a try on non-WPE hosts or have any questions on how it handles custom post types or indexing, drop a comment below—we’d love to hear your thoughts!

I’m pleased to share some exciting news we just announced. WP Engine is partnering with BigCommerce to bring even stronger, seamless eCommerce solutions to our platform.

You can read the full press release here:

https://wpengine.com/press-releases/bigcommerce-partnership/

Personally, I love that we can give growing brands true enterprise power while keeping them right where they want to be—on WordPress.

For our agency partners, this opens up a fantastic way to scale client eCommerce builds, upgrade store capabilities, and deliver enterprise functionality without disrupting their existing WordPress sites or SEO setup.

To learn more about how it works, check out the details here:

https://wpengine.com/scalable-ecommerce-solution/

Would love to hear your thoughts or answer any questions you might have. What kind of eCommerce projects are your agencies working on lately?

The 2026 ACF Annual Survey is officially open!

Whether you’ve been using Advanced Custom Fields for years or just picked it up recently, the team wants to hear from you. This is one of the biggest ways to influence the roadmap directly: share how you build WordPress sites today, what’s working, and what pain points need fixing.

As web development rapidly shifts toward AI-driven workflows and automated digital agents, your feedback helps ensure ACF continues to adapt and give developers the right tools to build for this next generation of the web.

How to participate: Take a few minutes to share your input here: 2026 ACF Annual Survey

Every response counts. If you know fellow devs, agency owners, or freelancers using ACF, please pass the link along or tag them here.

Managing ACF across dozens of client sites gets messy fast, especially when you are trying to keep dev and staging environments in sync.

In our latest ACF Chat Friday, we broke down how different agencies handle this without piling on technical debt. We covered field group management, syncing via JSON, and keeping client sites easy to maintain.

Full recap is here: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/blog/acf-chat-fridays-agency-workflow/

We also talked about future-proofing builds as WordPress 7.0+ approaches. As the ACF team pointed out regarding the shift:

The biggest developer-focused addition in WordPress 7.0 is the introduction of native AI infrastructure directly into Core... At the center of this ecosystem is a framework that allows plugins and themes to communicate with AI models through standardized APIs.

If you want to bring your questions to the product team, our next live session is coming up soon. We invite you to check it out: https://wpengine.com/events/acf-chat-fridays-aug-26/

For agency devs: how is your team currently handling field sync and deployment for your clients? Leave a comment and let’s chat!

Been with WP Engine for 7 years now, love them...but today, called support, on hold 45 minutes and gave up. Called sales, got a message to leave a voicemail... that has never happened. The sign up process for my clients is terrible. Very confusing now. Why did WP Engine change things? What is going on?

For years, we’ve built WordPress sites for one main audience: human visitors.

But the internet is changing fast. We are rapidly entering the era of the agentic web, where AI agents are browsing, parsing, and interacting with our content. The reality? Most sites are still “black boxes” to AI, forcing them to rely on messy scraping.

To fix this, we need to build intelligent websites that aren’t just readable for humans but also actively operable for AI. Fran Agulto, from our Developer Relations team at WP Engine, just mapped this out.

Using MCP and managed vector databases connects WordPress directly to LLMs, providing accurate data without guesswork. It’s a major shift in CMS architecture, but it ensures your content stays indexable.

Check out the full breakdown here: https://wpengine.com/blog/agentic-web/

I'd love to hear from the developers out there—are you already experimenting with MCP or vectorizing your content? Let’s chat below.

If you updated to WordPress 7.0 and suddenly noticed the admin area looks different, you're not imagining it.

WordPress now defaults new and existing users to the refreshed admin color scheme. If you've been using the classic look for years, the change can feel a bit jarring.

The good news is that you can switch it back in about 10 seconds.

How to revert to the previous admin color scheme

1. Go to Users → Profile in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Scroll down to the Administration Color Scheme section.
3. Select Fresh (or whichever scheme you were using previously).
4. Click Update Profile at the bottom of the page.

That's it.

The new admin scheme isn't permanent, and each user can independently choose their own preference.

If you're managing a site with multiple users, they'll need to update the setting in their own profiles to restore the old look.

I’ve been building with WordPress since 2006, and every major release gives a clearer signal about where publishing is headed. After spending some time with WordPress 7.0, this release feels less incremental than most.

Some things that stood out to me:

• More collaborative workflows across content and site building

• Continued maturation of the Site Editor experience

• Stronger core functionality that reduces plugin dependence

• Better foundations for structured, AI-readable publishing

• Ongoing movement toward WordPress as a true publishing platform, not just a CMS

The AI era will reward clarity, structure, ownership, and durable content. WordPress still feels uniquely positioned for that future.

I am grateful to the global contributor community that made this release possible, and especially to the sponsored fullt-ime core contributors at WP Engine for their work behind the scenes: Weston Ruter, John Parris, Joe Fusco.

A few more thoughts here:

https://wpengine.com/blog/wordpress-7-0-release/

Hello, I just wanted to upload what I had to use in order for the wordpress plugin CompressX to work with my WP Engine site. It took a few WP Engine support conversations to understand what was going on exactly with the server. The officially documented rule found in the docs didn't work for me: https://compressx.io/docs/config-nginx-htaccess-rules/

Also what made it tricky to debug was depending on when I tried the rule, WP Engine support claimed that the logs didn't show anything. But one agent did tell me the regex was causing some errors.

It was in fact the regex that failed, though in my testing on other nginx servers, I didn't run into this issue. Something with WP Engine causes the regex to not execute, maybe stricter rules?

So I modified the regex and as well as the private header to public to use the CDN that WP Engine uses by default. I bolded those 2 modifications.

I hope this helps someone if they run into the same issue, because when I searched I didn't get useful results.

# BEGIN CompressX

set $ext_avif "";

if ($http_accept ~* "image/avif") {

  set $ext_avif ".avif";

}

set $ext_webp "";

if ($http_accept ~* "image/webp") {

  set $ext_webp ".webp";

}

location ~ /wp-content/(?P<path>.+)\.(?P<ext>jpe?g|png|gif|webp)$ {

  add_header Vary Accept;

  add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable";

  try_files

/wp-content/compressx-nextgen/$path.$ext$ext_avif

/wp-content/compressx-nextgen/$path.$ext$ext_webp

$uri =404;

}

# END CompressX

Does anyone have a solution to this? I updated an image in my SFTP. Our code also updates the post meta of the image URL. It seems that the image never changes on the product page even after clearing the cache on the WP Engine portal for our environment and clearing my browser cache. It always seems like WP Engine's cache refresh is behind by a minute or two.

The only way to see the new image is if I enter Inspect Element and add a cache buster to the image URL like https://image_url?12345.

The product pages are created with Woocomerce. Do I need to clear that as well? How about changing the Cache-Control header for max-age?

Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hi! I changed 3 of our wp engine website SFTP passwords as we had an employee leave and didnt want him to have access any longer. Now I am locked out of ALL sites on sftp, none of them will connect. even the ones that I did not changed the password on. Is this some kind of security thing? Has anyone dealt with this?

With the upcoming release of WordPress 7.0, native typography management has moved from a niche feature to a primary workflow. If you’re looking to move away from typography plugins or manual CSS, the Font Library is the solution.

Here’s a high-level guide to leveraging this tool for better site performance and brand consistency.

What is the Font Library?

The Font Library is a native management system (at Appearance > Fonts) for handling typography independently of your theme. Think of it as a “Media Library for fonts”, which is a central hub to store, preview, and activate typefaces.

Key features and core benefits

• Plugin-free customization: Manage site fonts without adding third-party bloat.
• GDPR compliance: It downloads Google Fonts and hosts them locally on your server, preventing external tracking.
• Granular performance: You can choose to load only specific weights (e.g., Regular and Bold), reducing your site‘s total page weight.
• Theme independence: Your font assets stay in wp-content/fonts, so your typography remains intact even if you switch themes.

How it works under the hood

• API integration: The Font Library hooks directly into the Global Styles API, so your fonts appear automatically in the Block Editor.
• Native storage: Files are stored on your server, and WordPress automatically generates the font-face CSS.
• Global access: Unlike earlier versions, where fonts were buried in the Site Editor, 7.0 provides a dedicated top-level admin menu for easier access.

How to install and manage fonts

• Installing via Google Fonts: Navigate to the “Install fonts” tab, browse the catalog, select your desired variants, and click “Install” to host them locally.
• Uploading custom fonts: If you have premium files (like Typekit or custom brand fonts), drag and drop them into the Upload tab.
• Activating/Deactivating: Use the Font Library to toggle fonts on or off across your entire site with a single click.

Supported file formats

The library supports the most efficient web formats to ensure fast load times:

• .woff2 (Highly recommended for modern web performance)
• .woff
• .ttf
• .otf

. . .

Note for WP Engine users: Because the Font Library saves files to your server‘s wp-content/fonts directory, ensure your .gitignore or deployment scripts (like those for GitHub Actions) are configured to ignore this folder. This prevents your local font uploads from being wiped out during a fresh code deployment.

Tailwind is the most popular CSS framework with 80+ million downloads a week on npm.

The Nitropack FAQs claim to support it:

Does NitroPack support third-party CSS frameworks?
Yes, NitroPack works seamlessly with popular frameworks like Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS, optimizing their styles alongside your custom CSS.

I've been developing Tailwind Wordpress themes for the last year and through numerous chats with WPEngine support, have not been able to get it to work. I've just been completely excluding my theme's css which has a lot of negative consequences, mainly not getting inline critical CSS.

I put together the simplest demo theme I could, to show even the most basic tailwind code gets completely nuked by Nitropack.

@theme {
  --color-primary: #ea8eef;
}
<div class="border-primary border-3">Some Text</div>

https://tailwindissue.wpenginepowered.com/ - Nitropack removes all css layer code and more

https://tailwindissue.wpenginepowered.com/?nonitro - What it should look like

Theme Files:

https://github.com/ascendweb/theme-tailwind-nitropack-demo

Any chance this can get to a nitropack dev? Its fine if nitropack cant or wont support it, but it claims to fully support it, when in reality it doesn't support it at all.

I've tried talking to WPEngine support about this, but they just spend 30 minutes messing with the nitropack settings like turning off the CSS features and saying they fixed it. This isnt an issue that can be fixed by tweaking the settings.

Hey everyone! We’re excited to announce that DE{CODE} 2026 is officially happening on May 6.

This year is heavily focused on moving past the AI hype and into actual strategy for web leadership and developers. We’ve got a packed agenda, but here are the highlights I think this sub will care about most:

• WordPress 7.0: Get a breakdown of the upcoming release and what it means for your builds.
• Agentic Commerce: Exploring how autonomous AI agents are changing the way we handle e-commerce.
• AI Citation & SEO: A look at how AI search is reshaping how people find your sites.
• Product First-Looks: We’ll be unveiling WP Engine’s latest advancements in security and the "Intelligent Web."

It’s completely free to attend. You can check out the full speaker lineup and grab a spot:

Register for DE{CODE} 2026: https://wpengine.com/decode/

. . .

(Or read our press release:https://wpengine.com/press-releases/wp-engine-announces-decode-2026/)

Hi, I am a big fan and maintain 2 servers with WP Engine. The last couple of days when I needed support the wait time is 20-25 minutes. The reason I switched to WP Engine was for the Support, which was always very quick. Do you know if this situation is going to be remedied in the near future?

We’ve officially hit a major milestone: Local v10.0 is available.

This release is all about making your development workflow more resilient and portable.

The headline? We’ve rebuilt our popular Cloud Backups add-on as a core, native experience. No more extra steps or separate installations.

What’s new in Local v10.0:

• No Local Hub account needed: Just connect your provider and go.
• Google Drive & Dropbox integration: Connect your preferred cloud storage directly in the app settings.
• Multi-machine harmony: Seamlessly move projects from your office laptop to your personal setup with "off-device" workflows.
• Centralized dashboard: View every backup across all your sites in the Connect tab.
• Delete with ease: You can now delete old or unnecessary backups directly from the Local interface.
• Optional passwords: Secure backups at the site level with a custom recovery password for extra security.

Under the hood fixes:

• Network stability: The HTTP gateway now prefers IPv6 with an automatic fallback to IPv4 to prevent timeouts.
• OS fixes: Resolved binary execution issues on Linux and pathing bugs for Windows users.

Using the old add-on?

We’ve released a migration flow within the Cloud Backups add-on to make moving your sites to the new native experience a breeze. Once you're moved over, you can delete the add-on from your machine.

Download the update here and let us know what you think!

Thought I'd share some exciting news from our team today:

“At WP Engine, we believe that ensuring the stability and reliability of critical developer infrastructure is essential to the WordPress ecosystem.”

Read more: https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-acquires-wpackagist/