The WordPress team uses release candidates as a final review before the release. As a WordPress user, testing the release candidate on a copy of your WordPress site helps you see how it works with your theme and plugins on a regular website operation.

The WordPress environment comprises themes, plugins, and website customization that testers might not include in the beta testing. So, you may identify issues or bugs that the testers and developers missed during the development phase.

For example, developers and testers might not have noticed a plugin compatibility issue as they didn’t test it with that specific plugin. As a result, it may lead to errors like the white screen of death on the release candidate.

Discovering and reporting these flaws will help developers fix them before the final release, preventing other users from experiencing the same problem.

Testing the release candidate is also important for theme and plugin developers. They need to verify if their themes and plugins will work seamlessly with the new major release. Once verified, developers can update the readme files and safely confirm that their products have been tested up to WordPress 6.0.