WordPress, the world's most popular content management system that powers more than 30 percent of the web recently released WordPress version 5.5. It was well awaited because of its auto-update feature, and it was ideally supposed to improve the overall performance of the CMS and plugins. But all of this ended up doing quite the opposite for many of us.
WordPress version 5.5 breaks plugins and themes
After installing WordPress version 5.5, many bloggers and website owners and developers have been reporting problems with their plugins or themes installed on their CMS (Classic Editor, Elementor, Yoast, Woocommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, Jetpack, RankMath, etc) which happens to be among the most used WordPress plugins worldwide. Many website owners now have their personal business websites broken, and are looking for help on the forums.
The update essentially left the WordPress admin panel broken for some website owners. Following the installation, pull-downs and pop-ups would stop working, as also experienced by mensis.ro.
How to fix WordPress version 5.5 issues
We have now come across a new workaround that temporarily fixed your broken plugins in the WordPress dashboard.
All you need to do is download and install this official WordPress plugin: Enable jQuery Migrate Helper. The plugin's description on Github highlights both the issue as well as the fix:
"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 that 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."
Thankfully, installing the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin worked for us and many other colleagues, fixing these issues.
Once you install this plugin you may see the following notification in your admin panel:
Right now you are using the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin to enable support for old JavaScript code that uses deprecated functions in the jQuery JavaScript library. You will see warnings about these functions while using WordPress administration, but they will not be shown on the front-end of your site. To check if there are any warnings generated by your theme please look in the browser console.
If you get warnings, you should check the theme or plugin that generated them for an update. There will very likely be one you can install. When you have updated your plugins and themes, and there are no more warnings, please deactivate Enable jQuery Migrate Helper.
A script, a file, or some other piece of code is deprecated when its developers are in the process of replacing it with more modern code or removing it entirely.
The long-term goal is to get developers to update their extensions. Developers need to make sure they are testing their extensions against WordPress 5.5.
Downgrading WordPress should also fix the WordPress 5.5 bug
If you wish to be safer, you can also downgrade to a previous version of WordPress. To cut down the technical part (where you needed to install it via FTP), you can use this plugin. You should downgrade to WordPress version 5.4.2. Before doing so, please disable all the other plugins.
Future plans to remove to remove jQuery
jQuery Migrate 1.4.1 script was removed from WordPress 5.5. This version of jQuery Migrate should make older code compatible and should help developers migrate to jQuery 1.9+. The tentative plan is to update to the latest version of jQuery and add the latest version of jQuery Migrate as part of the WordPress 5.6 release.
The third part of the process will be once again removing jQuery Migrate from WordPress. This change is planned for WordPress 5.7, which will not be released until 2021. The end goal is to remove the reliance on Migrate and ship the latest version of jQuery until someday — perhaps far into the future — there may no longer be a need for bundling it with WordPress at all.
Did this plugin help you fix WordPress 5.5 bug? Can you now access your website? If so, please share this article with the world!