#1115 – Unknown character set: ‘utf8mb4’

WordPress does not support MySQL 4 : To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things: MySQL version 5.0 or greater (recommended: MySQL 5.5 or greater) https://wordpress.org/about/requirements/ While the utf8mb4 encoding is recent change and you might work around it, overall you still need compatible MySQL version.

Masonry – Can’t Find Variable imagesLoaded

I discovered that by removing the footer.php file, I was removing a link to the function wp_footer(); which essentially does this: function wp_footer() { /** * Print scripts or data before the closing body tag on the front end. * * @since 1.5.1 */ do_action( ‘wp_footer’ ); }