WooCommerce Release Schedule

WooCommerce operates on a predictable release schedule, delivering updates with new features, enhancements, and bug fixes roughly every five weeks. This page summarizes the main stages of our release process, such as feature freeze, beta and release candidate periods, and the timing of final and patch releases.

Additional details on how the release cycle looks inside the monorepo can be found on our Git Flow docs

tip

To view the actual schedule for current and upcoming releases, see our release calendar.

Milestones

Feature Freeze & -dev release (day 1)

As a result of the code freeze automation, a few things happen:

• A dedicated release branch is created (release/x.y), where the future release undergoes testing and stabilization. No new features are included on this branch, only bug fixes.
• A -dev release is built and made available on GitHub.
• Development of new features continues on trunk.
• A pre-release post is published on our developer website (example).

Beta 1 (+1 week)

At this stage, various testing processes take place:

• (Internally) Regression testing with Woo-maintained extensions, regression testing in multiple environments, and exploratory testing (including by contributing teams).
• (Community) The pre-release is announced so the community can begin testing.

Any issues found during the beta period are addressed either directly against the release branch or by backporting fixes from trunk (preferred). Refer to the backporting guide for more details.

release/x.y remains the source of truth for anything going into the upcoming release.

Beta 2 (+1 week)

At this stage, we release regression fixes discovered in -beta.1 as part of release stabilization. The pre-release announcement continues to be updated.

RC 1 (+1 week)

Last round of (internal) checks before the final release.

If anything is found at this stage, a fix is merged into the release branch (release/x.y) as in the beta phase.

Final Release (+1 day)

We make the stable release version available to everyone. At this point, the Developer Advocacy team publishes release highlights that are prepared in advance (example).

Point/Patch Releases

Patch releases are used to ship important bug fixes to our users, which were detected after the final release. They are versioned x.y.z where z is non-zero.

We follow the same convention as during the beta and RC phases for merging any fixes:

• Bugs that are only present on the release branch are fixed against the release branch release/x.y.
• Bugs that have a working fix on trunk are backported.

Delays

Due to business needs or any critical bugs discovered during testing, the release dates may be subject to change.

We do not take this decision lightly and only do so to guarantee the stability of a release. When this happens, we will always communicate the situation (example) and update the release calendar.

For details on how a delay is managed, refer to the release troubleshooting guide.