Month: April 2023

Critical error with WordPress – just reinstall again

I’ve been getting several occurrences of Critical error when attempting to access WordPress on this site and I’m not 100% sure exactly what is causing the issue – I suspect it’s the automatic upgrade breaking things but doing an in-place upgrade to WordPress after the issue occurs seems to fix the issue each time.

Initially I thought it was a recent upgrade to PHP on my host and several old plugins using invalid php code that was causing the site to fail, however renaming the plugins and the themes folder to .old did not fix the issue.

After downloading the latest version of WordPress and extracting the files over the top of the original install the site then became available. This then enabled me to login, rename the theme directory, rename plugins and everything continued to work.

This did mean it was a good opportunity to spring clean the site and remove some old plugins that were no longer required.

I’ve rearranged the sidebar, removed an odd paragraph that was displaying an empty box and removed duplicate category and tag links. I’m still looking for a new blog layout theme – a lot of the WordPress themes seem to be focused on either a 1-3 page product site or box sites that consist of as many short excerpt posts as possible on the main page.

I really don’t like the excerpt page option – as most of the time I’m wanting to read everything in the article that someone has written. It’s especially annoying in RSS readers when you then have to click through to the site to read the rest of the content and that typically results in an unsubscribe from me.

I’m hoping some of this will fix the site from being dropped by Bing Search engine – something I’ve been struggling with for a couple of months and so far the support team have been completely useless in answering why the site has been removed from the index.