In reviewing an older post on one of my sites I realized that comments from visitors were no longer showing.

 

I could see the post count - just not the actual comments.

 

I traced the issue to WordPress 5.5.

 

WordPress made a change in how comments are classified and if your theme isn't up to date with that change your comments, too, may not be showing.

 

In the past, WordPress didn't assign a "type" to comments. This field was left blank.

 

As a result, theme designers wrote their code to only look for comments that had a blank "type" classification.

Starting with WordPress 5.5 all comments are now assigned a "type" by default and the type they're using is "comment".

 

If your theme only looks for comments that have a blank comment type they will no longer find any and so no comments show at the bottom of your posts.

 

The theme needs to look for comments that have a comment type of "comment".

 

If you, too, are missing comments from your theme you should look for a theme update or contact the theme creator.

 

 

 

If you don't have comments on your posts yet you might have this issue and not know it. You can always comment on one of your own posts to test it and then delete the comment later.

 

If you're super-WordPress techie, there's no update for your theme, and you aren't getting support from the theme creator you can create a child theme, create a functions.php file for your child theme, copy the comment php code from the parent theme's function.php file, paste it into your child theme's function.php file and find any reference to case ''.  Change that to case 'comment' and that should fix the issue.