So…I have run into the nightmare that no bloggers like to see: my site went down.

It was actually raised by a friend of mine as I happily gloated about the fact that I finally set live a restaurant review that I wrote around 5 months ago (the, ahem, duck and waffle one), and this morning she came back saying that she couldn’t open the page. 

This has happened before, and in the past this had always been caused by a plugin going astray. When this happens, the fix was quite easy: you just have to turn off the plugin one by one until you isolate the trouble-maker, then simply find an alternative. 

This time, however, was different. Not only did I get the dreaded “you have a critical error” message, but that I have lost all my admin access: I was no longer able to get into my site:  the admin page of my domain didn’t work because, well, the entire domain went down; and accessing the admin through wordpress told me that the site could no longer be accessed. In short, there is no way for me to even access and turn off any plugin to troubleshoot or fix the problems. 

After half a day of work, I have finally got it live again, and I wanted to document how that was done in a fairly non techy way so that I can have a future reference, or if any of you happen to have come across the same issue you’d have a user’s point of reference. (spoiler: I did have to ask for help, which you can find towards the end of the article)

My approach

To start off with, I am not a total beginner to websites. I work in digital marketing and ecommerce, and I love nerding around with data and SQL. So although I am not a developer I am always down for troubleshooting technical issues, and this is what I did. 

As my domain sits with BlueHost, my first port of call was with their troubleshooting guide. If you host with someone else, I’d suggest you simply go on google and search “wordpress critical error [+host name]” then you should be able to find it. Other popular articles also come from Kinsta, and wpbeginner – in general the details are pretty much similar.

For my purpose, I will focus on BlueHost’s article. From their words, this kind of error is often caused by “either a malfunctioning plugin/theme, script, or code, and version/system incompatibilities; that prevents WordPress from functioning properly”. They have suggested a number of solutions and this is how I got on:

 

1. Look through The debugging email sent from WordPress and fix the error identified

I have no luck with this one unfortunately, as I didn’t receive such an email from WordPress. It would certainly have made life easier if I did. 

2. Turn off plugins manually in Bluehost’s interface

Here they suggested going into my site → manage site → Plugins tab and simply turn off all the plugins to see if it is causing issues. 

I have no luck with this as turning any plugin off this way returned an error message that they couldn’t do so. 

As part of the process, you can also turn off all plugins off by changing the plugin filename in the cPanel: i.e.   advanced → file manager →  your directory (usually “public_html”) → /wp-content → your-plugins.   If you change the name of the folder to something else then all the plugins will be turned off 

I also had no luck with this – changing folder names didn’t make any difference 

3. Switch to default theme 

Again the interface doesn’t allow me to change the theme, so no luck here either 

4. Re-upload a theme, Re-install wordpress 

I didn’t attempt these ones as they required me messing with the folders, or using a FTP client which I am not familiar with at all. So this is where my digging stopped

5. Raise the PHP limit

This one actually came from the Kinsta article. I also gave up on this – I didn’t really understand what PHP is, and trying to explore how to do this with BlueHost sent me into a rabbit hole. SO I GAVE UP

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So none of these worked… what next? 

Yes, I am a bit stuck. Basically I have lost the ability to change anything with the website (whether it be deactivating plugins or changing themes) and therefore have not been able fix anything – highly frustrating. 

As a last resort, I decided to seek help. A quick googling landed me on these people: Fixed.net

They apparently specialise on fixing wordpress websites and have pretty decent trustpilot ratings:

So I decided to give it a go. The cost isn’t exactly cheap at £49 but they are the only ones who actually gave me a cost upfront – and I managed to find a 20% discount code so that took me down to £40. Rather than pulling my hair out for a whole day trying to fix the issue, and damaging any of my limited SEO rankings along the way, I figured that it was worth a go. 

And, believe it or not, they fixed it within 2 hours! And my site is now back.

I don’t know how they did it (I have asked the question – and still waiting to hear back), but seriously that is some pretty good turnaround time there. 

The whole process is also pretty easy: you simply sign up → pay → give information about your issue → supply login details in their secure section (which is good) → then someone will come help fix your problem. 

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Conclusion

So, all in all, if you come across a WordPress critical error and don’t know how to deal with it, I would encourage you to do what I did: try fixing it yourself first (ref the links I posted above), and if none of them work then go get help – and Fixed.net is a pretty decent choice. 

If you are reading this and are laughing at how un-tech-savvy I am for not understanding the likes of FTP or PHP, I don’t blame you. It is an area where I have pretty much zero knowledge on and as my blogging journey continues there are definitely gaps I’ll need to fill. So bear with me.

Good luck! 

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Update: The issue and solution explained: 

So I have heard back from them about the cause of the issue and their solution: 

The issue was, in fact, related to a particular plugin. Specifically this was the error: 

Fatal error: Cannot declare class Mixpanel, because the name is already in use in /home1/rustyfoo/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-smushit/vendor/mixpanel/mixpanel-php/lib/Mixpanel.php on line 0

And the solution was “I renamed the plugin folder to switch it off from the file manager in Bluehost. I then checked the file to remove anything before the php opening tag. I then re-saved the file and enabled the plugin from the admin area.”

So, almost annoyingly, what I was trying to do in number 2 above could have worked but perhaps I wasn’t doing it properly. But either way, I wouldn’t have known how to remove anything before the php opening, but it would have been useful to know how to properly turn off the plugins like they do. If I find out – I will update it here

I am also working on really turning on the debugging function, as per here.  tbc on this! 

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