WordPress Playground had a busy year in 2025, with updates that make it more capable for day-to-day development, plugin previews, and learning environments. The project’s latest year-in-review highlights progress across performance, compatibility, database support, and tooling, expanding what can be done in a WordPress environment that runs in the browser and through the command line.

From faster load times to broader plugin support, the throughline is clear: Playground is moving beyond quick demos and into workflows that help developers and educators test, iterate, and share WordPress experiences more easily.

Reliable Plugin Previews and Experimentation

A headline update from 2025 is the focus on compatibility. In testing with the top 1,000 plugins from the WordPress plugin directory, 99% installed and activated successfully. That matters because it raises confidence in what Playground is best known for: letting people try things quickly, without a complex setup, and with fewer surprises.

This highlighted that Playground is increasingly useful as a general-purpose PHP sandbox. Alongside WordPress, it can support standard PHP tools and projects, which makes it easier to explore how WordPress fits into broader development workflows and to share reproducible environments with others.

If you try something new and unexpected in Playground, the update encourages you to share what you learn in the #playground Slack channel, so the community can build a clearer picture of what works well today and what is improving next.

Faster Load Times

Speed was a central theme in 2025. A recent year-in-review report revealed a 42% reduction in average response time, and this is not just a single change. A series of improvements make Playground feel quicker in the moments people notice most, such as loading WordPress, opening wp-admin, and switching between tasks.

Several behind-the-scenes updates were described in plain terms as “less waiting”: checks happen earlier, parts of the experience load in a smarter order, and more content is reused from cache, so repeat actions are snappier.

For people using Playground to review a plugin, validate a bug fix, or teach a class, these improvements mean the same thing: faster feedback loops, with fewer pauses that break concentration.

Better Tooling and Compatibility

In 2025, Playground also became more “toolbox-like” in the browser. The update highlighted features that reduce context switching, such as editing files on the page, building and testing starter configurations (Blueprints) in a dedicated editor, and launching database tools such as phpMyAdmin and Adminer with a single click.

On the database side, a significant compatibility upgrade was introduced to improve support for more complex database behavior. The practical outcome is that more WordPress sites and plugins behave as expected in Playground, and more developer tools can run inside the environment.

Blueprints also advanced in ways that benefit both builders and sharers. The updates focus on making starter setups easier to create, browse, and reuse, especially when a demo requires content, media, or a specific configuration that should launch consistently.

One of the clearest ways to see that progress is the WordPress Blueprints Gallery, a community library of ready-to-launch WordPress environments. From practical “building block” examples (such as starting with a specific login role) to demos that automatically install themes and plugins, to richer setups that generate posts and featured images via WP-CLI, the gallery demonstrates how quickly an idea can become a fully functional site that you can browse and share.

Examples:

For anyone who wants to experience the power of WordPress without the setup, the gallery serves as a strong reminder of what Playground makes possible: shareable, repeatable site experiences that work the same way every time — ideal for demos, workshops, testing, and “try it now” links.

Clear adoption signals back all of this. The review reports 1.4 million uses globally, documentation translations in multiple languages, and growing integration across the plugin directory through Playground-powered previews. It also points to a steady increase in community contribution, from documentation and support to talks and real-world workflows built on top of Playground.

A huge thank you to everyone who tried Playground over the past year, whether you launched a quick demo, tested a change, taught a workshop, or helped make the documentation more accessible in your language. And if there’s anything that would make Playground even more helpful for your day-to-day work, the project actively welcomes ideas and feature requests via the WordPress Playground GitHub issues tracker.

Looking Ahead

As we closed out 2025 and now look forward to 2026, we can see several forward-looking initiatives, including work on MySQL binary protocol support (to enhance broader compatibility with MySQL tools) and continued exploration of debugging enhancements, such as expanded XDebug access.

For anyone who last tried Playground as a quick demo environment, 2025’s updates suggested a shift in direction: Playground is increasingly positioned as a practical layer for testing, teaching, previewing, and reviewing WordPress, both in the browser and in local workflows.

In a special relaunch episode of Do the Woo, hosts discuss WooCommerce’s evolution with Matt Mullenweg, exploring its advantages, community impact, and future innovations.

For my first podcast of the year with the WordPress community, I joined the new Do the Woo podcast! It started with a little technical difficulty but ended up being a great conversation about WooCommerce, WordPress, and AI.