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If you’ve recently visited the WordPress.com Reader, you may have noticed some aesthetic improvements. Today we’re giving you a quick visual tour of those changes and inviting you to check out our new and improved Reader if it’s been a while. Let’s jump in!

Streamlined Consistency

Each of the individual cards within the reader have been redesigned to better highlight the content you’re sharing with your audience. Images and videos have been enlarged, padding and margins have been improved, and the general layout has been adjusted across all content types to provide a consistent reading experience.

Updated Layouts

A number of the layouts within the WordPress.com reader have been streamlined on desktop and mobile web to make browsing and discovering new content easier.

Grid Aligned

You might not notice this at first glance, but a consistent grid has been applied to the entire layout to make it easier for your eyes to scan content and scroll through your entire feed.

First of Many Improvements

This is the first of many improvements that we hope to make to the reader over the next year. If you have additional feedback on improvements we might make, please share them in the comments below and stay tuned for additional updates.

As 2022 comes to a close, we at WordPress.com are preparing to ring in the new year. As we get ready to say goodbye to 2022, we’re thinking about how quickly time has flown by this past year. 

Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics in February, the James Webb Space Telescope started transmitting jaw-droppingly beautiful photos back to us on Earth, and the incredibly powerful Site Editor launched for WordPress sites!

With 2023 just around the corner, so too comes Bloganuary! Bloganuary is a writing challenge for everyone, whether you’re new to blogging, rediscovering your love of blogging, or blogging is your livelihood — we want all of you to join us.

Bloganuary is a month-long blogging challenge in January, where you’ll receive a daily writing prompt to inspire you to publish a post on your blog. You can respond to the prompts in any way you like: a story, a picture, a poem, a drawing, a recipe, or even a song. Anything goes!

By being a part of Bloganuary, you’ll join a global network of bloggers creating and/or strengthening solid writing habits. You’ll get to know fellow participants on the Bloganuary community site, where you can share tips, learn from each other, find a new audience for your blog, and make new blogging friends.

To show others what you’ll be up to in January and encourage them to join in the Bloganuary fun, here’s a badge you can add to your blog (right-click and save/download to your computer):

Join the Bloganuary challenge, stay motivated, and start the new year off on the write track!

Learn more

If you’d prefer to journal privately instead of blog publicly, check out the Day One app.

For a holiday gift that’s absolutely brimming with possibility, look no further than our brand new feature which allows any reader to gift a WordPress.com subscription renewal to their favorite website.  

As a website owner, this is a way to allow your most ardent fans to show their gratitude for all the hard work you’ve put into your passion project over the years. 

As a reader, this is a way to show a bit of thanks to your favorite creators — be they bloggers, artists, small business owners, or even your pesky-but-loveable little brother who’s finally trying to give his site some attention. 

This feature will be displayed as a black banner across the top of the site, from which readers will be able to click “Gift” and then be taken right to a checkout page. 

Easy as that!

As of today, we’ve rolled out this feature to a small number of sites, but that number will be growing every day as we continue to test and iterate. For now, gifting is available on sites that are within 54 days of their annual subscription expiration date or within 5 days of their monthly expiration date. Soon, however, it will be available much more widely.

How to activate the gifting banner   

You can activate this new feature in about 15 seconds: 

1. From your admin dashboard, navigate to General Settings (Settings → General)
2. Scroll down, just a bit, to the “Accept a gift subscription” section 
3. Click the toggle to accept gifts 
4. Click “Save settings”   

After you’ve activated the banner, be sure to spread the word by writing a post about how your readers can help you out in a brand new way!  

A few more important details

Gifting applies to whichever plan the website is currently on. For example: a subscription gift for a site on a 1-year plan will be for the entire amount of a 1-year plan renewal; a gift to a site on a monthly plan will be in the amount of 1 month on their current plan tier. (Note that gifts are made in the site owner’s currency.) 

Once a gift is paid for, both the website owner and the person who gave the gift will receive an email confirmation. 

You can find even more nuts and bolts here. 

In September 2022, we released SSH for Business and eCommerce sites. SSH (secure shell protocol) allows you to access your site from the command line and use tools such as WP-CLI to manage your site, plugins, users, and more.

Our users loved the feature — but they wanted more. So we’re pleased to announce that we’ve added the ability to add SSH keys to your account to make it even easier to connect to your site. Read on to get started.

How to Setup and Use Your SSH Key

1. Copy your public SSH key to your clipboard.
2. From your WordPress.com dashboard, go to My Profile.
3. On the My Profile page, click on Security.
4. Click on the SSH Key option available in the Security Checklist.
5. Paste your SSH Key to the Public SSH Key field.
6. Click on the Save SSH Key button.
7. Select the site you wish to connect from the My Sites option.
8. From your dashboard, go to Settings → Hosting Configuration.
9. Under the SSH Access section, use the SSH Keys field to select the desired key.
10. Click on the Attach SSH Key to Site button.

Once your SSH key is attached to the site, you can use it when authenticating over SSH.

Detailed instructions on how to add an SSH key to your account are available now in WordPress.com Support.

Build Your Next Site on WordPress.com

Adding SSH keys is yet another way of integrating WordPress.com with your preferred workflow, whether you’re just starting out or are an experienced command-line superstar.

What else would you like to see in your terminal? How can we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Leave us a note or submit your ideas using our short feature request form!

Each year, members of the WordPress community (users, site builders, extenders, and contributors) provide valuable feedback through an annual survey. Key takeaways and trends that emerge from this survey often find their way into the annual State of the Word address, are shared in the public project blogs, and can influence the direction and strategy for the WordPress project.

Simply put: this survey helps those who build WordPress understand more about how the software is used, and by whom. The survey also helps leaders in the WordPress open source project learn more about our contributors’ experiences.  

To ensure that your WordPress experience is represented in the 2022 survey results, take the 2022 annual survey now.

You may also take the survey in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, or Spanish, thanks to the efforts of WordPress polyglot contributors. These are the most frequently installed languages based on the number of WordPress downloads. 

The survey will be open through the end of 2022, and then WordPress plans to publish the results sometime in 2023. This year, the survey questions have been refreshed for more effortless survey flow, completion, and analysis. Some questions have been removed, while a few new ones are now present, reflecting the present and future of WordPress. If you’re looking for the analysis of the 2021 survey results, those will also be shared in early 2023.

Spread the word

Help spread the word about the survey by sharing it with your network, through Slack, or within your social media accounts. The more people who complete the survey and share their experience with WordPress, the more the project as a whole will benefit in the future.

Security and privacy

Data security and privacy are paramount to the WordPress project and community. With this in mind, all data will be anonymized: no email addresses nor IP addresses will be associated with published results. To learn more about WordPress.org’s privacy practices, view the privacy policy.

Thank you

Thank you to the following WordPress contributors for assisting with the annual survey project, including question creation, strategy, survey build-out, and translation:

dansoschin, _dorsvenabili, angelasjin, arkangel, audrasjb, atachibana, bjmcsherry, chanthaboune, eidolonnight, fernandot, fierevere, fxbenard, jdy68, jpantani, laurlittle, nao, nielslange, peiraisotta, piermario, rmartinezduque, santanainniss.