Abstract: Thermally treated wood is an eco-friendly and sustainable material. After thermal treatment, some mechanical properties and surface wettability of wood reduces, and light aging is more likely to occur. In addition, the high temperature environment is required for the traditional technology during the thermal treatment process, which produces a lot of energy consumption, resulting in high production costs. In view of the performance defects of thermally treated wood and the shortcomings of production process, the research progress on performance improvement of thermally treated wood is summarized from the following two aspects: Performance improvement and process optimization. The enhancements on mechanical property, surface wettability, anti-weathering of thermally treated wood, and thermal treatment process optimization are discussed. Also, the limitation of themethods for properties improvement of thermally treated wood is analyzed, and the solutions are proposed. After that, this work suggest that it is better to combine the mechanism and practical application of thermally treated wood to avoid performance degradation caused by heat treatment, and to show the advantage of overall performance of thermally treated wood, which could increase the value-added utilization and expand the scope of application.