What’s new on your website: Q1 2026 updates

Monitoring and maintaining your website’s software is a key part of our day-to-day work, helping ensure everything continues to run smoothly and securely behind the scenes.

Over the past quarter we’ve reviewed and installed approximately 2,500 software updates across the websites we support.

These updates reflect the constant stream of improvements released across WordPress and the many different software tools used to run a website — including editing tools, contact forms, e-commerce systems, SEO software and security systems.

Here’s a look at some of the key updates over the past few weeks…

Keeping your website platform secure and up-to-date

The most recent major update to WordPress arrived in December and focused largely on behind-the-scenes improvements, particularly benefiting larger and more complex websites. This release, along with a smaller update in February, also included a range of maintenance and security enhancements, ensuring a stable and secure foundation for websites going into 2026.

Making websites easier for everyone to use

The underlying website framework (the template that controls the design and layout), used on virtually all websites we’ve built in the past five years, has also continued to receive regular updates.

A particular focus recently has been improving website accessibility, helping ensure websites remain usable for as many people as possible. For example, visitors with low vision, those who are blind, or users who cannot use a mouse, may rely on screen-reading software or keyboard navigation when browsing the web.

Recent updates have improved how navigation menus behave, making it easier to navigate websites without using a mouse. Improvements have also been made to a hidden “skip to content” link, allowing keyboard and screen-reader users to jump past the navigation menu directly to the main page content. And accessibility has been improved for websites with checkout pages, helping ensure online stores remain easy to use for all visitors.

Improvements to page editing tools

Beaver Builder — the page editing tool used across most of the websites we’ve built in recent years — has received a significant update.

A new feature called “Components” allows commonly used blocks — such as “contact us” or “book a meeting” sections — to be edited once and automatically updated wherever they appear across the site. Importantly, the content within these blocks can still be customised on individual pages where needed, helping ensure webpages remain consistent and easier to maintain. We’re already using this feature in new website projects.

There’s a revamped colour picker that can be set up with your brand colours, making it quicker to apply consistent colours when editing pages.

A smaller but helpful improvement is that list items (such as tick or bullet lists) can now be edited in bulk, making it quicker to update longer lists of information.

For websites using the WordPress block editor — which many websites use for publishing news or announcement posts — a new internal commenting feature has also been introduced. This allows teams to leave notes and feedback directly within the editing screen, making it easier to collaborate on content before publishing.

Updates for contact forms

The contact and enquiry forms used on many of the websites we build and support — powered by the Formidable Forms software — have also received several useful improvements.

Forms can now limit how many options can be selected in multi-choice fields, which can be helpful when collecting responses from visitors. There have also been improvements to how international phone numbers are handled.

More input boxes can now be placed within a single row, giving greater flexibility when designing forms.

There are also new options for adding branding to emails, improved anti-spam protection, and additional support for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) privacy compliance.  Please contact us if you’d like to explore any of these areas.

Search engine visibility and technical improvements

Alongside the visible parts of a website, many technical tools run behind the scenes to help keep websites fast, secure and easy to manage.

The LiteSpeed performance system, which helps websites load quickly by creating speed-optimised versions of webpages, has had two significant updates in the past quarter.

Many of our customers’ websites also use SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools to help search engines understand website content more clearly.  For websites using “Yoast SEO”, we can now connect the software to Google’s data to display additional insights about how your website is performing in search results.

We can also help guide AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, to locate information about your business more easily by adding a special “LLMS” (Large Language Models) file to your website.

Please contact us if you would like to explore either of these SEO enhancements or if you would like us to run an SEO audit on your website.

Online stores and payment improvements

Websites that include online stores have also received several updates over the past few months.

One useful improvement in WooCommerce affects how it processes data for its sales and analytics reports. For larger stores, instead of processing orders individually, the system now batches the processing twice a day, while still allowing the data to be refreshed immediately when needed. For busy online stores this helps reduce the workload on the website and keeps the dashboard running smoothly.

We can also enable a “cost of goods sold” feature if you want to track product profit margins more easily.

Another useful feature allows shareable product baskets, meaning you can send customers a direct link to a pre-filled shopping basket.

For products with multiple variations — such as different sizes or colours — the system now loads data more efficiently, helping the selections and prices appear faster for customers.

For websites using Stripe payments, improvements have also been made to the express checkout experience, particularly for customers paying with Apple Pay, Google Pay or saved cards.

PayPal has also improved its anti-spam protections, helping reduce fraudulent activity while keeping the checkout process smooth for genuine customers.

Updates for event booking websites

For customers using events software on their websites, there have also been numerous small improvements. One useful new feature allows a single event to be split into multiple time slots (for example morning and afternoon sessions) while keeping everything managed through one event page and booking form.

New domain and email monitoring

We’ve recently introduced an additional monitoring service for our Business and Enterprise customers. This service checks whether your domain name has been reported for spam or appears on email blocklist databases, while also monitoring key domain settings to help identify potential issues before they affect your website or email.

In addition, we’ve been continuing to roll out the Cloudflare protection service to busier websites. This helps filter malicious web traffic before it even reaches your website. Cloudflare is a market leader in website protection, and the same technology is used by many of the largest websites in the UK and worldwide, including The Times, BBC, Ryanair, Rightmove and Sky.

Cleaner website statistics with improved bot detection

Finally, many of our customers benefit from StatCounter visitor analytics, which we include as part of our hosting packages. The summary screen has recently been redesigned with faster-loading graphs and new controls, making it easier for you to view and explore your visitor statistics.

We’ve seen a significant increase in automated bot traffic across websites in recent months. These bots can sometimes inflate website statistics with fake visits, making it harder to understand real visitor activity.

StatCounter has therefore introduced an improved bot detection system, which separates bot visits from normal visitor statistics. Both good bots (such as search engine crawlers) and malicious bots are now separated into a new Bots dashboard, ensuring that your main statistics more accurately reflect genuine human visitors.

As a result, some websites may notice a slight drop in reported visitor numbers — simply because bot traffic is now being filtered out more effectively.

As always, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions about your website or if you would like to explore new features or improvements.