WB4SON.COM (this website) runs under WordPress. I have been receiving a warning for months that my PHP version was out of date (PHP is a scripting language used for web development). I figured I would go ahead and update it to the latest version. Unfortunately, when I did, my website crashed and gave me a critical error message.
I had recent backups so I wasn’t entirely panicked, and had always had good luck with the Customer Service folks at my hosting provider. Unfortunately I wasn’t able fix things myself, but customer service was able to do it for me. Essentially they disabled all the plug-ins my website was using – the usual reason for a critical error is a plug-in that hasn’t been updated and won’t support a newer PHP version.
Sure enough, when I checked the error log, one plug-in, called Sunrise_Sunset, was failing and was the source of my problem. Needless to say, I deleted it. I also deleted two other plug-ins that I was no longer using. Thankfully my website is back up and running the latest version of PHP with no errors now.
Moral of the story: Get rid of old plug-ins that might no longer be maintained.
Incidentally, disabling the plug-ins, a critical step in getting my site back up and running, meant that Akismet Anti-Spam was no longer protecting my website. In the 15 minutes or so that it took me to get rid of the bad plug-in and enable the good ones, my website had been pounded with spam comments, the vast majority coming from Russia.
