July 31 – August 13, 2026

Welcome back to the WordPress.com changelog. There are two bigger updates worth paying attention to this round, as well as a run of fixes:

Getting AI to write or design in your brand’s voice usually means describing that voice from scratch every single time, or settling for generic output when you don’t.

Guidelines is a settings page where you write it down once: how you write, what your images should look like, and what you’re trying to accomplish. The WordPress Agent in the editor, via Telegram, or via email pulls from those guidelines so any and all outputs are grounded in what makes your site uniquely yours.

Plus, you don’t have to start from scratch. On a paid plan, the WordPress Agent can read what you’ve already published and draft your guidelines for you, every section at once or one section at a time. Each suggestion arrives as a change you can accept or dismiss, nothing is saved until you choose to, and your published posts and pages are never edited without your review.

Find Guidelines under Settings → Guidelines, and enable the WordPress Agent on your site.

The purchase page for your plan now tells you plainly what’s happening and what it means for your site. As your expiration date gets closer, the message escalates from a heads-up months out, to a warning at 60 days, to an urgent notice in the final week. Each one spells out what you’d actually lose if your plan expires, too: things like plugins, custom themes, and your storage.

We shipped reliability and polish updates across WordPress.com too, including:

• Adding FLAC to the audio formats you can upload on a paid plan, alongside MP3, M4A, WAV, and OGG.
• Giving you more context if your card was declined and your payment fails so it’s easier for you to troubleshoot.
• Giving you a way out when a plugin install stalls (going to your plugin list or contacting support), instead of waiting for it to resolve itself.
• Stopping posts from showing up multiple times in the Reader.
• Sharpening featured images in the Reader’s compact mobile view.
• Improving the contrast and accessibility of the Views and Visitors chart in Stats.

If you’ve noticed these changes, we’d love to know what you think — leave a comment below!