WordPress 6.9 Is Doing Something Weird With Your Styles
Well, WordPress 6.9 dropped on December 2nd, and if your website suddenly looks like it forgot to get dressed this morning, you’re not alone.
What’s Happening
The WordPress core team made some performance improvements to how stylesheets load. The short version: they increased the inline style limit from 20KB to 40KB and changed how block styles load on-demand for classic themes. These are genuinely good changes for page speed.
The problem is that some themes and plugins—Elementor sites in particular—are now missing CSS. Layouts are collapsing. Fonts are wrong. Hero sections have wandered off somewhere. It’s the kind of thing that makes you stare at your screen and quietly say “huh” for longer than you’d like to admit.
The Fix
There’s a one-line code snippet that tells WordPress to load block styles the old way:
add_filter( 'should_load_separate_core_block_assets', '__return_false', 100 );You can drop this into your theme’s
functions.php
file or create a simple must-use plugin. If those words mean nothing to you, that’s okay. Keep reading.
Your Options
Option 1: Turn off automatic updates and wait
This is the “I’ll deal with it when they fix it” approach. WordPress will patch this. They always do. In the meantime, you can disable auto-updates for core and stay on 6.8.3 until the dust settles.
To disable auto-updates, add this to your
wp-config.php:
define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false );Option 2: Apply the fix yourself
If you’re comfortable editing theme files or creating a must-use plugin, the code snippet above should sort you out. Back up your site first. Always back up your site first.
Option 3: Hire someone to fix it
If you’d rather not touch code, we can apply the patch for you. It takes us just a few hours to get in there, verify the issue, apply the fix, and test everything. Our rate for this kind of quick fix is $500.
Contact us to schedule a patch.
Should You Panic?
No. This is just WordPress being WordPress. The open-source sausage gets made in public, and sometimes a piece of gristle gets through. The core team is aware of the issue, Elementor is working on compatibility updates, and life will go on.
If your site looks fine, congratulations. You can close this tab and get back to your day.
If your site looks like a ransom note made of mismatched fonts and collapsed columns, well, now you know why.
Design Web Louisville helps businesses and nonprofits keep their WordPress sites running smoothly. If you’d rather not think about things like inline style limits and block asset loading, we offer monthly maintenance plans that handle updates, backups, and the occasional “WordPress is doing something weird” situation.
