Fix your WordPress website after Updating to 5.5
WordPress recently released WordPress 5.5, which was an upgrade that was supposed to improve the overall performance and did just the opposite for some. Did you update and find that your site was broken, plugins weren’t working as they should? Or were your buttons in your WordPress Admin not working for you? “Select All” not selecting all, hover not working, pages not loading after click, and more? Unfortunately, WordPress update 5.5 breaks sites. There were two known plugin issues with this update: Yoast and Classic WordPress Editor.
The solution:
A simple one, and frankly, one that I wish WordPress might have advertised with the update. Install the WordPress plugin called: Enable jQuery Migrate Helper. That is all you need to do, and voila, you’ll get your site working well again.
The why:
(Directly from GitHub) “With the update to WordPress 5.5, a migration tool known as `jquery-migrate` will no longer be enabled by default. This may lead to unexpected behaviors in some themes or plugins who run older code.
This plugin serves as a temporary solution, enabling the migration script for your site to give your plugin and theme authors some more time to update, and test, their code.”
The long term:
While WordPress update 5.5 breaks sites currently, hopefully this will all be ironed out soon. Once plugin and theme developers update their code so that it’s compatible with the current version of WordPress, this problem should disappear. You may see some warning messages on your Admin Dashboard after installing this plugin. These will not show on the frontend of your website. These are due to an out of date plugin or theme. Please contact the developer of that theme or plugin for an updated version. Once you no longer see these warnings and everything is current, deactivate the plugin and check if everything is working smoothly.
Questions? Reach out.
