There is a critical error on this website

[gloriaktc]

My website shows a message "There is a critical error on this website.
Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress." NO email with debugging information was received. How do I fix this?
My knowledge is very limited, but I have been researching . Can someone please help?
Thank you.

[joemuller]

Hi Gloria,

I've sent you a private message with more details, but it looks like the Wordpress Optimize plugin broke on the site, which was causing most/all pages to fail to load properly. There's some fancy stuff that plugin does that can break when used in combination with other, older plugins, so I do not personally recommend using it. That said, I was able to get the site working again.

-- Joe M

[jschacht]

Hi Gloria and Joe,
I have the same issue. Neither I nor my tech support person is able to get into admin for the site, thus I can't look for or disable a problem plug-in. He suggested contacting the host (Sonic) to look for error codes but Sonic told me they can't do anything on their end.

Suggestions to get back in and resolve this? I should note that while I am reasonably good at following technical instructions, I have no tech expertise whatsoever. What I've stated here is about the depth of my understanding.

Thanks very much for any light you can shed!

Jennie

[joemuller]

Hi Jennie,

It looks like the hosting for your website was actually moved to another provider back around April 2022, so everything left on Sonic's side, aside from the Domain (Name) Registration will not have any effect on the live website. Since the website is now on servers outside of Sonic, I can only give some basic pointers based on what I see when visiting the Login page.

What's likely causing problems is your 2-factor authentication plugin -- I think it's called 'Authy for WP'. It looks like the official Wordpress plugin for Authy was discontinued [1] in 2018, so that may be related to why it is not working. I recommend seeing if your current hosting provider can help you disable that plugin so you can login with just your username and password into the wp-admin page and see if there are any indications there of what to do.

-- Joe M

[1] https://authy.com/blog/deprecating-authy-wordpress/

[jschacht]

Hi Joe,
Thanks very much for your helpful response!
I'd forgotten I'd moved the site over to Westhost, where I host another site. Once I got onto their cPanel I was able to update Wordpress and other plug-ins and remove the faulty Authy plug-in. Now I am able to log on and manage the page, and will replace Authy with a different authentification plug-in.
Thanks again for your help!
Jennie