The 7 best features of WordPress 6.3 for bloggers

WordPress 6.3, aka Lionel, landed on Tuesday 8 August 2023 after a round of beta testing. It has a number of excellent, new features, which will take a bit of getting used to. There’s been a lot of hype about it already, but what’s WordPress 6.3 like for bloggers who already have websites?

It’s all well and good having developers work on a major new release, but it’s the real world experience of bloggers that’s key.

Here’s my review of WordPress 6.3 as a real world blogger with three websites. What do I like and what don’t I like about WordPress 6.3, and what tips can I share?

Some of the links in this blog post are affiliate links. This means I may get a small commission if you buy something after clicking through.

Here are my thoughts as an amateur blogger on the key 7 features of the new WordPress 6.3 :

I like having a longer top toolbar, with more options, all along the top. It’s a better use of space.

However, I don’t like how the toolbar obscures the top of the righthand navigation pane, unless I minimise it with the two arrows.

There is now the option to see all the block patterns that your theme supports in the new Patterns menu in the left navigation pane. This is useful. That said, I tend to use Spectra blocks, so I suspect I’ll use it if the Gutenberg block editor has blogs that Spectra doesn’t.

You can also copy patterns to “my patterns” so they’re easy to find.

One of the problems with the Reusable Blocks previously is that if you made a change to it, it would change all of the other pages with the same block. It’s fine if you want the same content in multiple places (like my About Me reusable block), but if you wanted to create (say) settings for a table of contents, it didn’t work.

Now you can create two types of Reusable Blocks, that are called Patterns. If you toggle the sync off, if you make a change on a page, it won’t sync with all the other versions on the website. If the sync is turned on, it will sync.

This is the best of both worlds and I’ll use it for mini templates where I want a certain layout and colours, but don’t want the content to be shared. This will make life easier for bloggers.

My only disappointment is that there isn’t a short cut to go straight to unsynced patterns, so it involves a few clicks. Maybe that will come.

This feature of WordPress 6.3 is useful as it enables bloggers and content creators to set aspect ratios, and carry across the right aspect ratio to mobiles. This isn’t something that always happened before, and sometimes I had strange distrotions.

Being able to set the aspect ratio of images also encourages us to be consistent and selective about aspect ratios. This consistency makes the content easier on the eye than random sized images.

It’s also helpful being able to resize the image by putting in the width, and the height will be automatically adjusted in line with the aspect ratio.

I’m really happy to see the addition of footnotes. Although footnotes might seem to belong in realm of academia, they are incredibly useful for hiding detail away from the main body of the text. They can also add authority to the page or blog post, without burying it in detail.

One of my blogs often refers to legislation,¹ and I welcome being able to put some of the detail in a footnote, instead of having it in the text. It saves me having to do it manually.

The footnote function in WordPress 6.3 is easy to use for bloggers, once you get the hang of it.

‘m really happy to see the addition of footnotes. Although footnotes might seem to belong in realm of academia, they are incredibly useful for hiding detail away from the main body of the text. They can also add authority to the page or blog post, without burying it in detail.

One of my blogs often refers to legislation, and I welcome being able to put some of the detail in a footnote, instead of having it in the text. It saves me having to do it manually.

The footnote function in WordPress 6.3 is easy to use for bloggers, once you get the hang of it.

• You add the footnote number by clicking the footnote box in the drop down menu from the top tool bar. This will add a superscript number.²
• This will automatically create a footnote at the bottom of the page, which you can complete.
• Although the footnotes are placed at the end of the page, it is possible to add blocks after the footnotes, as I have done on this page.
• Readers access the footnote clicking on the superscript number. When they want to return to where they were, they can click on the little arrow to the right of the footnote to take them back
• I decided to add an H5 heading above the footnotes, as they looked a little “lost” without any any introduction.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible at the moment to change the way the footnotes appear at the end (eg by indenting them in the same way you can with lists).

Whilst the footnote feature may not be of mainstream, mass market appeal, it’s something I certainly will be using. Perhaps not in every blog post, but it’s nice to have.

To illustrate the new Details Block, I’ve shown show it works in practice. One drawback is that you can’t have a separate colour for the question and answer, which you can on the Spectra FAQ block. You also can’t change the icon.

Can it be used as an FAQ block?

Yes, and you can even hide images in the block as a surprise

This is a tiny change but I love how you can now change the top and bottom margins and padding independently of the left and right. It’s really useful for lists as I always find them a big tricky to look right.

Maybe next we’ll be able to change left and right, and top and bottom independently?

I’m happy with the changes in WordPress 6.3. I think some have been over-hyping them as they’re more incremental changes, rather than transformational.

No doubt WordPress will continue to innovate, and hopefully keep making the changes the makes life easier for bloggers who use the Gutenberg block editor.

1. For instance, Housing Act 1988 and Renters Reform Bill ↩︎
2. Like this here ↩︎

About Suzanne

Suzanne is lawyer and expert blogger, based in the UK, and runs the successful blog, The Independent Landlord.

She set up The Web Smith to help entrepreneurs build fantastic blogs to increase organic traffic to their websites and grow their businesses.

The key to building a blog with high organic traffic is to consistently create high quality content that the target audience wants to read. Then this content needs to be optimised for search engines, ie SEO.

Suzanne works with entrepreneurs to help them devise and implement a strategy for their website that’s right for their business. As part of this, she provides one-to-one consultation, SEO audits, website audits, content creation and editing.

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