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Hi,
I was recently brought in to help a volunteer org with their website. I was able to access the wordpress admin panel fine, but I noticed that all of the plugins were out of date. All of them were listed to be okay with the version of wordpress that was running, so I clicked Select All and updated them.
Now the site and admin panel are getting 502 errors (it’s been about 40 minutes). I tried to access via the ftp/sftp methods and both of them result in 502 errors as well. Downdetector lists the site as down.
What can I do in this scenario? I have no way of rolling back without admin/ftp access.
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1. Check the server error logs
2. Enable debugging
3. Ensure PHP is 8 or above
4. Make sure WP itself is up to date
5. Check plugin changelogs – any that haven’t received an update from the developer in 12 months need replacing with an alternative.
Try to contact the site admin / owner and get in contact with hosting. The plugins / theme are likely causing conflicts when updated. The best course of action is to restore back to the last stable configuration if possible, then update plugins one at a time until you find the ones causing issues. It’s possible the theme may be a problem as well— if it’s out of date try updating it with all plugins disabled first. If the problem is still present with the updated theme and all plugins disabled, try swapping to wordpress’s default theme and see if it is resolved.
u/bluesix has also suggested several other things to check as well— I would just like to add that you be sure to make a backup of the website before making any changes to the PHP version. If it’s a live site, I would also recommend doing the updates and debugging on a staging server so nobody sees the php errors and broken pages while you’re working (if you roll back to the stable version of the site). A lot of hosts provide a 1 click staging server option, so it may be a simple procedure customer support can help with. Once everything is fixed you can click another button to ‘push’ the changes to the live site.