It has come to the attention of our Support Department that updating a WordPress website to the 4.5 series will break themes using older versions of WPBakery’s Visual Composer.
Visual Composer is a WordPress plugin that provides a page builder for editing pages and posts. It does fancy things with layout that the standard WordPress visual editor does not.
Often times, commercial themes from sites like ThemeForest bundle Visual Composer with the theme as a convenience to the website designer. A software licensing issue arises where you need to contact the theme developer for new versions of the plugins bundled within.
The bottom line is that WordPress sites with a bundled Visual Composer will need to download a new version of their theme from ThemeForest or contact their theme developer directly to get a theme update in order to use the latest version of WordPress.
The theme & Visual Composer update is not always an easy one. In many cases, WordPress developers have said the Visual Composer plugin needs to be deactivated and deleted from your Plugins dashboard before your theme recognizes that a new version of the plugin needs to be installed. Deleting the VC plugin does not remove the formatting code from your posts so no layout will be lost in the update process. Contact a qualified WordPress developer if you need assistance with the update.
DivyWeb strongly recommends you follow the recommendation of the WordPress foundation and stay on the latest version of WordPress for security and bug fixes.