Many people are reaching out to us for help, so I thought I’d post a note about this. And as we’ve been updating our clients’ sites, we’ve noticed some issues with WordPress 5.5.
First, make sure you do enough testing as you upgrade your website. Check every page and, at least, all functionality.
The issue is with JQuery, which is JavaScript. Some functions don’t work. The fix is to install the “Enable jQuery Migrate Helper” plugin but even then, some fixes might need to be made.
If you are experiencing issues with WordPress 5.5, let us know. We’ll be happy to take a look at your website.
WordPress Plugin Automatic Upgrades
We do NOT suggest you turn these plugin upgrades on if your website is essential to your business. They should instead be done manually so your website can be tested. It’s essential to keep WordPress updated but we do not like this solution – at least for our clients.
We see issues with plugin upgrades about 20% of the time. That’s just too high.
When updates can happen any time, you can have problems arise on your website… at any time. That’s not good. It could happen at 2 am, for example – or even at 11 am… on a Saturday. If you enable auto upgrades on plugins, you then need to keep a sharp eye on your website.
Instead of having to keep an eye on your website all the time, just don’t go with automatic upgrades and set a time to upgrade your plugins manually. Set a reminder once a week.
When you do the upgrade, make sure you follow these procedures:
- Take a full backup of the WordPress files and database. Store that some place you can get to it easily.
- Take screenshots of essential pages so you can compare them later.
- Perform the upgrades.
- Test the website. Make sure all necessary functions work. Compare how pages look now with your screen shots.
- If there are problems, then fix the JavaScript, PHP, or CSS issues.
- Test again.
- If problems persist, consider restoring the backup. You can then go back and upgrade each plugin separately to find out which one is causing the problem. It may be more than one plugin causing the problem.
- Repeat until all issues have been fixed.
If that doesn’t seem like your cup of tea, then consider using Website Care by Webstix where updates are done weekly by an experienced team of developers. Our hosting clients that keep their WordPress sites up to date hardly ever get hacked. The hacks we see are on WordPress sites that are severely out of date. These updates are important.
-Tony