The WordPress 5.5 release caused a lot of issues to many WordPress websites. Highly popular themes like “Astra” and “Storefront” are also among them.
WordPress themes and plugins that offer image sliders, Galleries, featured images, pagination, sitemaps are highly affected. Multiple parts of the theme admin interfaces are also stopped working. These include popular plugins “Advanced Custom Fields”, “Ninja Forms Contact Form” including “Classic editor by WordPress” etc.
The main reason behind the issue is because of the removal of “jQuery Migrate”, a tool that comes with WordPress as default, and itis enabled by default before the 5.5 core update. This tool helps developers in a transitional period when jQuery was upgraded and removed some features. It is has been turned off by default In the 5.5 update.
How to resolve the Problem:
There is a “jQuery Migrate Helper” plugin, which will re-enable the migration tool. There are more than 1,00,000 Active installations of this plugin with a 5-star rating.
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.
“jQuery Migrate Helper” plugin description
This plugin serves as a temporary solution, enabling the migration script for your website.
In some specific cases, we can also use another solution by using the “WP Downgrade” plugin (“WP Downgrade | Specific Core Version”). This plugin simply downgrades the existing version to previous opted versions to resolve the problem temporarily.
This is advisable only as a short time solution. It is not a permanent solution.
The best solution is to update the theme or plugin to the latest version. If it is not possible, Designers are advised to migrate to a new theme/plugin which is compatible with the new update.
We hope WordPress will resolve this in future update.