Thousands of WordPress sites have become broken since updating to WordPress 5.5. The reason is that the plugins and themes that these sites are using are older and outdated. This article will show out the cause and a simple solution to the WordPress 5.5 problem.
Why WordPress 5.5 is Breaking Sites
In the past days, the Mango WP team has been asked for help regarding many problems related to WordPress 5.5. and sites losing functionality. The cause of some of the problems is older plugins. For others, the cause of the problem is older WordPress themes.
One of the support requests that we received was, unable to save and publish any post/page. There were also bugs related to plugins:
- Column Shortcut
- WP bakery
- Divi Builder
- Upsell plugin
- DP Portfolio Posts Pro
The source of all the problems was the older plugins that relied on jQuery Migrate Library to function. These plugins stopped working after WordPress removed that library. jQuery Migrate is a library that acts as a bridge for older code to function on WordPress.
What caused the WordPress 5.5 problem was older JavaScript in outdated WordPress themes, plugins. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is easy.
How to Fix WordPress 5.5 problem
In order to solve the problem, you must identify the cause.
If the issue is related to a plugin that is using older JavaScript files, check out when was the last time that plugin releases update. If the last time it has update version was a year or longer, you might want to consider looking for another plugin that is more up to date.
You know that older plugins that are abandoned can become a security risk. We always recommend our customers choosing a well-maintained plugin than a plugin that might have security issues.
If, after checking and updating the plugin that using older JavaScript files but your site still not working, you can try the second option below.
WordPress has released a plugin that restores the jQuery Migrate JavaScript library and restores the full function of a website. It is Enable jQuery Migrate Helper.
You can download the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin here.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-jquery-migrate-helper/
However, 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 WordPress Enable jQuery Migrate plugin has been downloaded over 20,000 times in 3 days since it’s been released.
This shows that WordPress 5.5 has affected a lot of websites and many publishers are searching for solutions to WordPress 5.5 problems.
Conclusion
Can’t blame totally WordPress 5.5 because for me it’s still a great thing. There are some issues related to WordPress 5.5 that have possibly affected websites that having some themes or plugins who run older code. But those problems are fairly easy to fix once the cause is identified.
If you have tried all of the above methods and still cannot solve the WordPress 5.5 problem. Then don’t hesitate to contact my team. They will advise you for free.