WordPress powers approximately 43 percent of every website on the internet, and the overwhelming majority of small business sites in The Woodlands, Spring, Tomball, Magnolia, and Conroe run on it. That market share makes every major WordPress release a consequential event for local business operators — even those who have never opened a cPanel or touched a plugin update screen. On March 31, 2026, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg announced in the official Making WordPress Slack workspace that version 7.0 will be delayed. The reason: a single ambitious feature that the core development team considers too unstable to ship on the original timeline. Understanding what changed, why it matters, and what it means for a local business owner's website is the purpose of this article.
The feature holding up the release is Real-Time Collaboration, commonly abbreviated as RTC. It is the capability that would allow multiple users to edit the same WordPress page or post simultaneously — the kind of live co-editing that Google Docs users have taken for granted for years. For small business owners who work with a marketing team, a contractor, or an agency, the appeal is obvious. Instead of one person editing a page and sending it for review, the business owner and the editor could work on the same draft at the same moment and watch each other's changes appear in real time. It is a meaningful upgrade to how WordPress handles collaborative content workflows, and it represents one of the most structurally complex features the platform has attempted to introduce in its two-decade history.
The complexity is precisely why the delay was called. Mullenweg's statement described the goal as targeting "extreme stability" before release, characterizing 7.0 as a milestone release that warrants stepping back from the project's standard date-driven schedule. The development team identified two specific technical problems that need resolution before the feature can ship safely. The first is a performance issue: real-time collaboration currently disables persistent post caches during active editing sessions. For a business website running on shared hosting in The Woodlands — the GoDaddy, SiteGround, and WP Engine plans that power the majority of local SMB sites — disabling post caches under load is a meaningful concern. Cache is a primary mechanism for keeping a WordPress site responsive under normal traffic; disabling it for concurrent editors could produce noticeable slowdowns on already resource-constrained hosting environments.
The second problem involves the database architecture supporting the feature. Contributors to the 7.0 project identified a fundamental mismatch in how the proposed Real-Time Collaboration table handles two very different kinds of data operations. Real-time editing generates high-frequency, bursty writes with very low latency requirements — every keystroke from every collaborator needs to be recorded nearly instantaneously. Synchronization between editing environments, by contrast, involves slower, structured updates that may require scanning entire table rows. Forcing both workloads into a single database table creates performance risk and added complexity that the team is not yet satisfied has been resolved. As of the delay announcement, a decision on whether to separate these into two purpose-built tables had not been finalized.
The technical resolution Mullenweg proposed — and the team adopted — is to remain in the Release Candidate phase rather than returning to beta. This distinction is more than procedural. Returning to beta would break PHP version comparison logic, plugin update behavior, and the tooling that automated workflows and hosting providers depend on to manage WordPress installs. Extending the RC phase with additional RC builds preserves compatibility while creating the runway for the core team to resolve the cache and database architecture issues. The extended RC period provides a wider testing window and invites more contributors to identify problems before the final release reaches the 500-million-plus WordPress sites in the wild.
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Begin Private Audit →For business owners in The Woodlands and the surrounding North Houston corridor, the immediate practical implication is straightforward: WordPress 7.0 is not arriving on the schedule that was originally communicated, and no replacement date has been confirmed. The delay is described as a one-off exception to the platform's date-driven release model, and Mullenweg has stated an intention to return to roughly four releases per year in 2027 as AI-assisted development accelerates the team's capacity. For a local business owner currently running WordPress 6.x, nothing about this delay requires urgent action. Version 6.x continues to receive security updates and maintenance releases on its normal cadence. The delay affects version 7.0 specifically — it does not affect the stability or security of currently running sites.
What the delay does affect is the update risk calculus for businesses planning a site refresh or a major plugin overhaul timed around a new WordPress major version. Theme developers, page builder teams, and plugin authors often coordinate significant releases with WordPress core version milestones. If a business in Conroe or Magnolia was planning a website rebuild for Q2 2026 with the expectation of launching on WordPress 7.0, a brief extension in that timeline is prudent. The extended RC phase means 7.0 will arrive with substantially more testing behind it — which is ultimately better for a production business site than a rushed release that ships with unresolved database architecture problems that could affect site stability after upgrade.
There is also a hosting dimension to this delay that has not received adequate attention in the initial coverage. Real-Time Collaboration is shipping with the feature turned off by default in 7.0. That is a sensible precaution. However, as Kinsta — a leading managed WordPress hosting provider — acknowledged to Search Engine Journal, hosting companies are still in the process of testing how RTC performs in shared hosting environments when enabled. The majority of small business websites in The Woodlands and Spring are not on managed WordPress hosting. They are on shared hosting plans where dozens or hundreds of accounts share the same server resources. How real-time collaboration performs under those conditions — particularly if multiple users on the same shared server enable the feature simultaneously — is a variable that hosting providers have not yet fully characterized.
The practical guidance for a North Houston SMB owner managing a WordPress site is to maintain current update discipline rather than accelerating or pausing it in anticipation of 7.0. Keep plugins, themes, and the WordPress core updated to the latest stable 6.x release. Verify that your hosting environment uses PHP 8.2 or higher, as compatibility with the eventual 7.0 release will require it. If your site relies heavily on caching plugins — W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket — confirm that those plugins are active and functioning correctly, because they represent the layer of site performance most likely to interact with the new RTC feature once it ships. These are maintenance steps that improve your site regardless of the 7.0 timeline.
The broader takeaway for business owners who rely on a WordPress website to generate leads, drive phone calls, and support local customer acquisition is this: the delay is a signal of discipline, not dysfunction. A core development team choosing to extend testing on a complex feature rather than ship it prematurely is exactly the kind of judgment call that keeps a platform trusted at enterprise and SMB scale for two decades running. The Real-Time Collaboration feature, when it does arrive, will be more stable and better tested for the extended RC phase. For the businesses in Tomball, Spring, and The Woodlands whose websites are their most important marketing asset, a WordPress core team that prioritizes stability over schedule is a core team worth trusting.
Matt Baum
Content Specialist at Gray Reserve
Matt covers the strategies, tools, and systems that drive measurable growth for SMBs. His work at Gray Reserve focuses on translating complex marketing and AI concepts into actionable intelligence for business operators across The Woodlands, Houston, and beyond.
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