WordPress 5.5 – Bugs and Fixes

WordPress 5.5. was released on August 11th, 2020. Numerous bugs and issues have been reported with this release. Although this is labelled a minor release, the update involves significant changes to core files. Many WordPress users have discovered broken themes, widgets, and images after this update.

Here are a few of the common bugs and fixes for WordPress 5.5 we have encountered:

Themes and Plugins:
Broken themes and widgets after updating

Images:
Images being stretched vertically (or horizontally)
Unable to upload any images (2500 pixels error)

BUG: Broken themes and widgets after updating

Many older WordPress themes, page-builders, and plugins, rely on a resource called JQuery Migrate. In WordPress 5.5, this was suddenly removed by the development team – this is a big one! Many people will notice broken themes and widgets after updating to WP 5.5. Thank you WordPress!

It will take some time for plugin, page-builder, and theme developers to make changes. Some developers may opt-out of providing backwards compatibility.

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.

THE FIX:

If possible, rollback to a previous version of WordPress such as 5.3 or 5.4.

POSSIBLE FIX:

WordPress has created yet another plugin (as with Classic Editor) to patch their development. The JQuery Migrate Helper plugin will help to alleviate this issue, and to identify the older code or plugins and themes causing issues. We have not tested the plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-jquery-migrate-helper

Please note this only considered a temporary solution by the WordPress team.

BUG: Images being stretched vertically (or horizontally)

The core developers saw in their wisdom, to force a width and height on ALL images. If you don’t apply any width or height values to an image, then WordPress will now force that width or height to 100%. Many users have left these values out of their images, or relied on themes and plugins to manage this. Many will be in for a pleasant surprise, when their images are all distorted after updating to WP 5.5.

My friend Jeslen posted this bug to the WordPress Trac:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/50909

THE FIX:

You can add what is called a CSS Reset to your theme’s style.css file. This should be placed as close to the top of the file as possible:

img { max-width: 100%; height: auto; }

BUG: Unable to upload any images (2500 pixels error)

This bug since WordPress 5.3+ won’t let you upload any images. My client noticed this one after updating to WP 5.5. Most people think it’s because their images are too large, php ini settings, server issues, or whatever. Fortunately you don’t have to waste your time (as my client and I did) trying to lower your image sizes or tweak max-upload settings.

Post-processing of the image failed likely becuase the server is busy or does not have enough resources. Uploading a smaller images may help. Suggested maximum size is 2500 pixels.