daveren

Update:
The link to my web site above is a duplicated test site that I have made some changes to recently. Please refer instead to the original site that I have not changed:
https://www.todcreekwatershed.ca/
This site is still on WP v4.7.

I did manage to update the test site (2019-todcreekwatershed.ca) to WP v5.4 and it did not correct the problem.

I am thinking now that there is conflict with the character encoding between the site settings and the database settings. On the test site, I am investigating how to properly correct that situation. So I have changed the “collation” field in PHPmyadmin, table: wp_posts: post_content, from “latin1_swedish_ci” to “utf8mb4_bin”. This works for the page posts, but now the text in all the pages are littered with question marks (instead of spaces?). Everything else appears OK.

Update: Based on the suggestion on this webpage: https://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/how-to-fix-the-character-encoding-problem-in-wordpress-1480
I commented out the 2 define, UFT coding lines in the wp-config.php file and it solved the character recognition problem ….. but ….. now all my original text is lost from the page editor. So I swapped back to the original config file. So it looks like a incompatibility with the text encoding, eh?

Thank you, Macwitty!
The upgrade fixed it.