Neocities is Improving – And I Noticed!
Posted on August 11, 2026 by Aywren
As a daily user of the Neocities hosting platform, I’ve observed some quiet updates the site has begun to roll out over this past year. These things are sometimes hard to spot unless you use the site as much as I do, and there are no release notes out there that I can find.
There is a GitHub for Neocities and I do see work happening in the “Supporter Redesign” branch in particular. As a paid Supporter, I’m not sure if these have been rolled out to the entire site or not – the only view of Neocities I have is of the Supporter side. Still, these changes are so universal that I can’t imagine they were limited to just Supporters.
While none of the changes are absolutely earth shattering, they are all a BIG improvement to the way the site works for those who are building pages and using the backend area of Neocities. I wanted to give credit where it’s due and talk about the changes I have seen.
Much Improved Security
Now, when you log into Neocities for the first time, you’re met with a new security verification screen.
Basically, this emails a code to your account’s email address and requires you enter that before you can log into the site.
Simple, right?
Well, before this, there were NO security checks that I saw on Neocities. No way to add 2-factor auth or anything. So basically, all of the sites I run were hosted with just a password to protect them.
I am very, very grateful for this new security check. While it’s not perfect, it’s much better than nothing.
Dark Mode
Dark mode tends to be a hit or miss thing for me on sites. Sometimes I like it and use it. Sometimes I don’t. I know dark mode is a favorite amongst net-goers, so to have the option of switching to a dark mode is nice.
It wasn’t that long ago that I took note of a new icon at the top right corner of my Neocities dashboard.
Yep. You can now Neocities in dark mode!
Improved Site Switcher
As a Supporter, I can host a number of different sites on my Neocities account. I can also assign each of those with an individual paid domain (which has to be hosted somewhere else) if I want, or simply use the subdomain that Neocities provides.
I have about 9 different sites on Neocities, including this one and a number of other creative projects and fan sites. Previously, to switch between these, you would click the drop-down menu in the top right corner, then mouse over to a second nested menu within that.
This worked but it was funky. Like if you moved your mouse just slightly off either of the menus, they’d roll back up and vanish.
Not too long ago, we got the gift of a much-improved site switcher!
Now instead of a menu-within-a-menu, switching sites is a full pop-up with a scroll that allows you to much more easily view and select the site you want to switch to. No more of that sub-menu vanishing jank.
Such a great change!
File Selector
Previously, when working with numerous files in the Neocities file manager, there was no way to select more than one file at a time. This meant that if you wanted to, for example, delete three files within a folder, you had to scroll down to find file1, click delete next to it, wait for the file to delete – which would scroll you back to the top of the folder screen, then scroll down to find file2 and repeat… repeat…
This… worked… but it was time consuming.
So, when I saw this, I was overjoyed:
Now you can click select to enter the select interface and either Select All or select individual files you want to delete. So, so, so much better! Thank you!
The Bing Thing
One last thing I wanted to add to this list, which wasn’t an interface feature, but was a nice win for Neocities users. Apparently, there was a time when the Bing search engine was not indexing webpages that used the Neocities.org domain name.
Other stuff was going on as well, as indicated by this official Neocities blog post. However, back in January, this was all thankfully resolved!
Again, much appreciated!
I first started hosting sites as a pet project back in December of 2020, when I worked to revive my old FFIV fansite, recreating it as I left it from an early 2000’s HTML backup. I say that because since then, I’ve seen little in the way of changes or updates to the Neocities environment. Not until this year, in fact.
I’m not sure what changed, or what it means that we’re getting these lovely improvements. I hope it’s all for a good thing (I get antsy that things are going to be sold off or something because that’s been my experience over the years). I love hosting my sites on Neocities, so the last thing I want to see is it go the way of corporate hosting or something.
But enough of that! This was supposed to be a thank you and appreciation post!
So, thank you Neocities for giving my sites a home over the past almost 6 years. May the site continue to provide a much-need service to the indie web!