I have a staging site that’s being worked on by a developer that apparently caused overuse of resources (100% CPU usage) leading to slow loading times that even affected the main/live site. It got to the point where the developer was unable to load either the staging site or the main site at all – only getting error pages – and thus unable to make any changes to try and figure out the issue.
Fortunately, I could still access both sites and was able to log in to the staging site WP backend somehow and deactivated ALL the plugins. After reactivating them however, the homepage is broken, only posts and other pages seem to be working, and the developer is claiming that “the site is back to where it was before I started working on it – some or most of my work is gone and I need to do them all over again”.
How is this possible? My understanding is that deactivating any plugin simply turns it off – but it shouldn’t affect the configurations and certainly shouldn’t affect any dev work? Am I wrong?
When I load the staging site now on my “work browser” where I was able to log in to WP and deactivate the plugins in the first place, I can still load it just fine and to me it looks exactly like it did before all this. However, if I use Incognito or a different browser on the same computer, I see the broken homepage. I’ve purged the cache through Cloudflare as well as WP and the issue is still here. Any idea what’s wrong?
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This does not make any sense.
Let me ask you this, are any of the plugins, like elementor plugins or any of it’s derivatives or any page building plugin ?
If so turn those on.
next you need to upgrade hosting plans to the higher plan. Go 2 step higher.
Also I have a feeling you have Site ground for hosting ? Am I correct ? If you do, I can point u to an article that will help
More than likely the widgets being used for the homepage are now in the “inactive widgets” section on the widgets page.
Some themes (we genesis framework a lot) will default to standard blog layout unless at least one of the homepage widget areas are active. We even code this into our child themes.
Hard to know for sure, but deactivating the plugins would not take a site back to scratch all of the data associated with those extensions is still saved in the database (unless completely uninstalled which is a different beast)
Have a check in the inactive widgets section (right at the very bottom of Appearance > Widgets page on the left hand side.
If they are there, drop one in a widget area and see if it brings the homepage back up.
Good luck 😉