Last Updated on January 17, 2020 by Christopher G Mendla
When I upgraded to WordPress 5.3, Convert to blocks became erratic and in many cases wouldn’t work at all. Here is a work around.Â
I have some sites that went through migrations from, believe it or not, Frontpage to Blogger to Joomla to WordPress. WordPress included a migration from the classic editor to Gutenberg Blocks.
I had used the “convert to blocks’ feature to convert many of the old paragraphs to blocks. It seemed to be working well.
However, the update to WordPress 5.3 seems to have broken something. I was editing some posts where I had applied ‘convert to blocks’. However, while the previous large all encompassing paragraph had been broken into blocks, I couldn’t seem to convert them to Classic Paragraphs or even regular Gutenberg paragraphs.
The blocks looked like the following
Work Around
I stumbled into a work around that appears to resolve the issue. Simply select all the text in the block and cut. Then choose ‘convert to blocks’. Paste the text back in and you now have a real block where you can change the type to a classic paragraph or other appropriate block type.
In the image below, you can see that the block is now a full featured classic paragraph block.
Why Blocks?
WordPress has moved to Gutenberg Blocks. It seems that they are here to stay. By going through the conversion process now, you will avoid an even larger job in the future.
Also, once you get used to Blocks, they have advantages over the classic layout in terms of ease of use. (For most people).