My block is showing as broken—what do I do?

There are many reasons why a block can show up as broken in your editor. Luckily, it is often a quick process to resolve it.

Attempt to resolve it

From WordPress 5.6 the default option when you encounter a broken block is to resolve it. This often works without a process and fixes your issue.

If you’re on a version prior to WordPress 5.6 the default option will not be to resolve it. Instead, click on the advanced menu (the three vertical dots) and select resolve from there.

Why do blocks break?

Occasionally you will come across a block that has broken. Because of the way the visual editor works, it relies on the generated HTML code to be consistent.

Sometimes the generated code in the editor and saved code in the database are mismatched. Primarily for one of two reasons:

1. An upgrade introduced a markup change that we failed to account for. A bug that is our fault.
2. You managed to, most likely by mistake, adjust the HTML formatting causing the block to break.

In all fairness, the most likely scenario is the first. We take care when releasing changes to avoid this and create automatic upgrade paths. If you do encounter a broken block, please let us know. We’d like to fix it.

Block is not supported

If you encounter an error message saying that the block can not be found or is not supported, there has been some form of error behind the scenes. Please contact us and we’ll look into it in your specific case.