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I recently took a position where I am responsible for the content on our website. I am trying to make a change and keep getting “critical error on this website”. I don’t get an email and the videos I’ve watched are no help. I’ve reached out to the person who set up the website but surprise! No response for about two months now. Any tips on how to go about this?
Thank you!
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This is a pretty common and very annoying problem. It’s usually caused by an out of date plugin or theme that doesn’t have a recent update. Occasionally it can be a code snippet added in the theme’s functions.php file. Sometimes the error will prevent you from getting into the site altogether, other times you’ll just see it when you visit a particular part of the website (e.g. a backup configuration page.)
The email that gets sent usually has helpful information but unfortunately it only gets sent to the official “Administration Email Address.” Which is almost always the email of the original developer. And in your case they’re out of touch.
There’s not an easy way to redirect critical-error messages to anyone but the official “Administration Email Address” address. It’s also really difficult to change it since many older sites aren’t very good about sending the necessary confirmation email.
You can at least try going to Dashboard -> Left Sidebar -> General and changing that “Administration Email Address” to your email address. Then check your inbox for a confirmation email message.
Of course if you’re getting that critical error message on your login page then you’re not going to be able to update anything through the interface. If you have access to the site’s hosting company control panel you have more options.
There’s very complete documentation with multiple methods for debugging and fixing critical errors on the excellent WPBeginner blog: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-the-critical-error-in-wordpress/
Enable debugging so you can see the error message: https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/debug/debug-wordpress/
You’ll need to enable debugging in your wp-config file to debug the site and actually see the error the site is throwing, not just the vauge “critical error” message.
in wp-config.php `define(‘WP_DEBUG,’ true);` When you are done debugging, set this back to `false`.
Make sure all your themes and plugins are up to date.
Turn off all your plugins and enable them one by one until you find the one causing the error. Most of the time, it’s a plugin causing the issue.
You’ll probably need a developer to solve it, but the error causing the issue should be in your web hosts “error logs”. If you check there and it mentions a specific plugin you could try disabling it. But it’s going to look pretty cryptic for you, it’s definitely something technical that’s meant for developers.
Make changes on a staging site for testing, then push to live