Hopefully someone can help me, anxiety level is high right now. I recently gained access to the rather old website of one of our subsidiaries. Hadn’t been updated since 2021. I did a backup and I updated plugins and updated to newest version of WP. The theme plugins wouldn’t update though (Avada Fusion Builder and Avada Fusion Core – apparently this issue is common with Avada from the research I’ve done) and when I tried to go to the homepage to change some of the content I got a critical error. I tried multiple different things to update the plugins to no avail.
My colleague who wants this site updated asap said let’s just start from scratch and choose a new theme, the site is extremely basic and we’re not tied to the existing theme. This is where I’m out of my element, I’ve never created a new site. Anyways went to themes, add new theme, picked one at random and installed thinking I’d play around with it and see how it all worked. The theme must have installed but I’m now just stuck at the critical error page. I can no longer get to the back end and make any changes or even uninstall the theme. When I go to the website itself, it has the new theme applied (with all the stock photos it came with etc) and I have all the WP menu options along the top but clicking any of them just takes me back to critical error page. I need to remove this new theme so the page at least goes back to looking like it’s supposed to. I’ve never encountered this before, how do I fix this??
What kind of error do you see when you load the website?
Can you go to your host account and install the backup to return to square one?