If you’ve updated your WordPress core to WordPress 4.5 and found that your theme is now broken or that certain functions are no longer working properly – you’re not alone. Jason sent in a question to our YouTube channel asking for help. Here’s a video to show you how to fix your WordPress website after you update.
If you’ve updated your WordPress Core to 4.5 and now your theme is breaking – here’s a quick video to help you know how get help fixing it. Thanks, Jason, for sending in the question.
How to update your WordPress website – https://youtu.be/u8uImsx2aGY
Updraft Plus Plugin for backups – https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/
Great article from Sarah @ WP Tavern on WordPress 4.5 https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-5-coleman-released-introduces-custom-logos-responsive-previews-improved-editing-experience
How to create a Child Theme – https://youtu.be/9l0du9I7p2M
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton and I’m so excited that 4.5 WordPress is out.
So, “Coleman” you guys- it was just released yesterday. A lot to celebrate as they’ve really just outdone themselves with a lot of cool updates for the WordPress core.
If you haven’t already watched the video, there’s a really great video that you can watch right here that kind of gives you a very quick run through of what some of the awesome updates have been. Just kudos to the team that did all this awesome stuff.
When you go to update your WordPress Core, (you’ve log in to your dashboard and you see there’s this big update alert and you go to press update and everything breaks) you could seriously go into a panic.
We got a quick email this morning from one of our awesome followers on our YouTube channel-Jason sent this in:
Dear Kori,
I’ve upgraded my WordPress website to the latest version today and suddenly some of the my sites using the enfold theme does not display any parallax background in this section. In addition, all anchor links on the same page do not animate correctly once we click the button to scroll up or down, it transfers quickly to the appropriate section. So, it doesn’t have that really cool animated scroll.
He’s asking, “are you going to do a video on that any time soon?” I said, “Why not today? Let’s do it today.”
Here’s the thing, if you are upgrading (which you should because security purposes you should always keep your website up to date)- what can happen though is there can be a domino effect take place. Once you update your core then very typically your theme itself is going to need to be updated and you’ll probably get quite a few alerts that plug-ins themselves have to be updated. It’s kind of this domino effect, right? It trickles down.
Update your core 100%. You need to do that. You also need to be sure you have a backup in place. If you haven’t already heard of this, I posted it many times. UpdraftPlus is one of the best free plugins you can use for backing up your website.
My suggestion is-install UpdraftPlus, backup your website, then go click update. That way you know for sure you have a backup in place in case anything does break. You always want to do this before you’re doing any sort of updates to really anything (any plugin even.) We never know how it’s going to react (on the update.)
If it’s too late (if you’ve already clicked update) and now you’re in a panic and you’re searching on YouTube for how to fix my website (since it’s all broken now) there are a couple of things you can do. More than likely if it’s a theme issue that’s now broken, what you can do is go into your dashboard and see if the theme itself is asking for an update (is telling you that this needs to be updated as well.)
Twenty Fifteen-I’ve already updated it so it doesn’t have that alert. None of my current themes have that alert on it but yours could have a red alert saying, go ahead and update. If you have purchased this theme (if it’s something that you purchased) maybe over on Themeforest you can go there as well. Take a look. As you scroll down- (if you’re using the Avada theme or whatever theme you’re using) scroll down to an area over here on the right side that’ll tell you when it was last updated. If you have not updated your theme since that last update, that’s exactly what you need to do. You need to stop, download the theme again and go update your theme.
Be sure (of course) that no matter what you’re doing you have a backup in place.
If your author has not released an update yet and you’re still experiencing these breaks, you can do a couple of other things. You can email that author and say to them. Most of these authors over here on Themeforest have a support form or an area to connect with them so you can view their portfolio (typically.) If you’ve already contacted them you can go into Themefusion. You can go over here to these guys and walk through and figure out, how do I connect with them? I can email them directly. Some of theme even have a few areas for getting on a support form, right? That’s super important for you to do because that’s free support (you don’t have to pay for that.) You can just connect with them and say, “hey you guys you need to issue an update because we’re seeing all these breaks happen.”
It’s very typical.
I know it’s very scary-very frustrating to be running a broken website so the faster you’re able to move on it and get support, the better. From here on out always have a backup in place so that you can update your website safely and securely. If anything does break (of course) you can just roll it back. I will also make this suggestion to you. This is just my personal opinion (there’s no scientific- there’s no blog on this over in the codex.) This is me saying to you, I typically wait a few days after a major release before I click update on my core. One of the reasons why is I want to be sure that overall the community has said yes to it. The community has said it works. We don’t see any extra alarming alerts go out.
Very typically WordPress and their team does an outstanding job making sure that they put it in beta testing first before they really launch it and allow the public to go after it and update. It’s not too scary but you can experience a few broken issues on websites.
I hope this helps you. I hope it gives you a little bit of direction and don’t be a panic mode. Just be sure that you’re going to go in and always have backup in place. Be sure that you are able to connect with whoever your theme author is so that you can get help from them as well.
All right. I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday. I’ll see you next week when we talk about, “How to Put Shortcodes inside of PHP files.”
Talk to you then!
Bye, y’all!
