On Saturday, I installed a WordPress plugin that caused the W♥M website to crash and burn. I got that dreaded so-called WordPress’ “White Screen of Death” and I knew it was because of the plugin. I tried to remove the plugin via the admin plugin panel, nothing worked. I just could not delete the plugin.
I requested help from WordPress, and the tech support I got was an AI. The robot was no help and said I need to talk to a human (which it requested someone to take a look at my case). I waited 12 hours, but the human help never came.
I couldn’t sit around doing nothing, so I tried looking online for help. I tried everything, but nothing worked, because I didn’t have the Business Account that would allow me to SSH and remove the horrible plugin.
Eventually I figured it out. This was how I was able to fix my website:
Danger Zone: Reset Site
STEP 1: Make a complete back up of the entire website using Jetpack VaultPress Backup (this service is part of WordPress). This might take a few minutes or hours, depending on the size of your website.
STEP 2: Once you have the site backed up, go to wordpress.com/sites/(yourwebsiteurl)/settings and click on “Reset Site”. It will ask you to confirm by having you type in the website’s url. This will nuke everything (destroying all the posts and images, and importantly the plugins).
STEP 3: After the reset, you can go back to the Jetpack VaultPress Backup and restore from your backup. You’ll select everything EXCEPT PLUGINS. Do not restore the plugins. This might take a while, depending on the size of your website.
STEP 4: Everything should be working fine now, obviously you don’t have any plugins… so you’ll need to re-add in the plugins that you need and that worked before. Going forward, do not install any plugin that isn’t compatible with the current PHP.
NOTE: After resetting, you may have to re-log into your website. The easiest way to do this is to go to WordPress.com and have them email you a login link (for some reasons my correct password never works).
Some thoughts on this whole disaster: I’m surprised how dangerous some plugins are. I’m also surprised how easily it was to just destroy a website with just a plugin. And it’s weird how WordPress didn’t warn you or had some sort of automatic reset to a previous state (like an autosave for the website before installation).
Another learning lesson is that WordPress’ tech support is atrocious. You can’t get any help, and the steps I wrote above – that wasn’t even a suggestion from the robot. It didn’t even tell me to back up the website! I had to think put these theories to test… and, boy, was I nervous about resetting the website. What if it didn’t work? What if I lost 10k posts? Yeah, I was scared to do it.
Of course, after restoring the website, minus the plugins, in hindsight, I should have done this much sooner. You can’t rely on WordPress’ tech support, because there are none. If you’re having similar problems, I suggest trying to fix it yourself. Going forward, I’ll regularly make backup (maybe even download it offline just in case).
