WordPress 5.5.1 Which Helps You Fix Millions of Broken Sites

Developers of WordPress published a maintenance release that fixes issues that broke millions of websites.

WordPress published new information that describes why WordPress 5.5 negatively affected millions of websites, a staggering amount. WordPress is publishing a maintenance release, version 5.5.1. Then, developers design to serve as a patch to give time for plugin and theme developers to update their software.

The announcement about what went wrong linked to a spreadsheet naming hundreds of plugins and also themes that were affected.

The spreadsheet also notes what the specific issue is for each plugin and theme. Surely, it will help software developers fix their plugins and themes.

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WordPress 5.5.1 Maintenance Release September 1, 2020

The WordPress 5.5.1 maintenance release is to stop sites from breaking. But the errors will still need to be fixed.

WordPress described the issue like this:

“In WordPress 5.5 the global JavaScript objects listed below were removed without being deprecated. WordPress 5.5.1 adds a backfill for these globals so they no longer cause JavaScript errors.”

Plugin and theme developers have until March 2021 to patch the code. Failure to patch the code will result in another round of site failures.

According to WordPress:

“The plan is to remove this fallback code in two major versions, so this will be deleted in WordPress 5.7. This gives plugin and theme developers ample time to remove the conflicting code and switch to using wp.i18n”

Millions of Websites Affected

The spreadsheet revealed the previously unknown amount of sites that were broken.

There initially was casual speculation that the impact was relatively small and limited to thousands of websites. But that wasn’t the case.

WordPress 5.5 negatively impacted millions of websites.

It is for that reason that a patch was urgently released today, September 1, 2020.

Some Plugins Already Fixed

Not all the plugins on the list continue to be broken because they fixed some.

Among the affected plugins with millions of users:

SiteOrigin Widgets Bundle +1 million users
Advanced Custom Fields +1 million users
Ninja Forms Contact Form – The Drag and Drop Form Builder for WordPress +1 million users

Partial List of Plugins Affected by WordPress 5.5

WordPress Gallery Plugin – NextGEN Gallery
Polylang
Child Theme Configurator
Simple Custom CSS and JS
Toolset Types – Custom Post Types, Custom Fields and Taxonomies
Max Mega Menu
WP AutoTerms: Privacy Policy Generator, Cookie Notice Banner, Terms & Conditions Generator
YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
Ocean Extra
WordPress SEO Plugin – Rank Math
Meta Box – WordPress Custom Fields Framework
Hummingbird – Speed Optimize, Cache, Minify & Defer Critical CSS & JavaScript
Content Views – Post Grid & List for WordPress

Popular Themes Affected by WordPress 5.5:

Astra +1 million users
Storefront +200,000 users
Hestia +100,000 users
Neve +100,000 users
ColorMag +100,000 users
Customizr
Hueman
Zakra

In addition, there were many more themes. See the link below for lists of all affected themes.

Update to WordPress to 5.5.1

Developers designed the maintenance update to patch a wide range of bugs that discovering after releasing 5.5. For those that rolled back their sites to a previous version of WordPress because 5.5 was breaking their sites, this is the version that should be downloaded. Developers discovered and fixed it.