When I announced my retirement from web design and development, I expected my future blog posts would be about technology, writing, social media, and birding.
Though I still care about them, my days of publishing posts about usability, accessibility, and WordPress were over.
Little did I think a month after my retirement I would once again be writing about WordPress.
Specifically, about the Jetpack plugin.
Yet here I am.
And I’m exasperated and frustrated and decided I needed to vent.
Something I’ve rarely done in the 2,000+ posts published on this blog.
Why Can’t I Write a New Blog Post?
When I logged into this site and tried to create a new blog post, I encountered the error message:
There has been a critical error on your website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.
Which had me wondering what might have happened on the site. I could:
- Log in to the WordPress dashboard
- View the dashboard.
- View all my posts and pages
I hadn’t upgraded any plugins or themes since I last published three days earlier.
No site admin email message was sent to my mailbox, so I started taking some basic steps.
Checked the site in another browser. Cleared the site cache.
And then discovered another issue: my site layout changed. The main navigation wrapped, the footer was missing.
And the fatal error message still displayed on every post and page on the site.
Which meant I had some troubleshooting to do to understand what happened.
Troubleshooting and Jetpack
My first step to track down the issues was to review the site error log.
Where I discovered an issue pointing to the Jetpack plugin.
[01-Feb-2023 11:15:33 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 18874368) (tried to allocate 65536 bytes) in /home1/…/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/vendor/jetpack-autoloader/class-php-autoloader.php on line 90
I knew I hadn’t updated Jetpack for a couple weeks.
And it wasn’t clear to me what could cause the error message; the site was set up with more than enough memory.
So I tried to reach Jetpack support. I have the paid Jetpack plugin, which provides online support.
Which I’ve done in the past, with successful outcomes.
But not today.
Why?
Because Jetpack support has made it impossible for you to reach them.
I logged into my account, only to be redirected back to the Jetpack website.
Asking me to log into my account.
But I’m already logged in!
I kept thinking it was an issue with Jetpack, so I disconnected and reconnected Jetpack on my site.
At least I thought I did.
Until I saw the Connection information in my Jetpack dashboard confirm the site was connected, only to be followed by another sentence that the site wasn’t connected.
Huh?
Given I wasn’t getting anywhere with Jetpack and couldn’t get online support, it was time to take another approach.
Time to Check my Site Hosting Configuration
At that point, I logged into my website host account. I already checked the Site Health report in WordPress, and noticed my PHP version was 8.1.
But I knew my site had been using 7.4 for the past several months.
Upgrading to PHP 8.0 had caused site issues in mid-2022.
And I knew WordPress core is not yet supporting PHP 8.0 (it’s still beta, as of February 1, 2023). Check the PHP compatibility and WordPress table for the latest updates.
From what I found in the web host site configuration, my site was indeed running PHP 8.1.
I contacted host support by chat to confirm the settings for PHP. When they told me the server had recently been updated to 8.1.
Without telling me. Not a good thing.
However, I had the option to downgrade PHP on the site. Which I did.
Voila!
My site worked correctly and displayed as it should.
Yay, I was glad!
But, there was still a question in my mind.
What PHP Version Does Jetpack Support?
Trying to confirm what PHP version Jetpack supports led to conflicting answers.
-
In the plugin repository, the Jetpack plugin FAQ has
Sites must be built on PHP 5.6 or greater, but Jetpack always supports the latest version of PHP.
The current stable version of PHP is 8.2.1 (as of February 1, 2023).
What does Jetpack mean by the latest version of PHP?
-
A reply in the Jetpack support forums from Dan, says
Jetpack follows the requirements of WordPress core and can consequently be used with any PHP version from PHP 5.6 up to PHP 8.0. That includes PHP 7.4.
It’s not clear to me what to believe regarding PHP compatibility in Jetpack.
Why I’m Frustrated with Jetpack
Given I was able to resolve the problem, why am I frustrated with Jetpack?
- If I was able to reach Jetpack support, I would have told them my current PHP version. And I expect their support person would immediately tell me Jetpack isn’t compatible with PHP 8.1 (as of February 1, 2023).
- Once I disconnected and reconnected Jetpack (one of their troubleshooting recommendations), I was shown conflicting information in the Jetpack dashboard about whether my site was in fact connected.
- I wasted hours of time tracking down the issue with PHP compatibility in Jetpack. Something Jetpack could quickly add in their plugin description (Jetpack works in PHP X.X and below) so other Jetpack customers don’t waste their time.
Summary
Troubleshooting fatal error messages on WordPress can be time-consuming.
When a plugin chooses to not provide easy access to support and has conflicting PHP compatibility information, troubleshooting can be exasperating and time-consuming.
It shouldn’t be so difficult.
Jetpack, you can do better.
Gosh! That is frustrating. Glad that you were able to solve the problem, no thanks to Jetpack!
Hi Claire,
Thanks for stopping by. I feel bad for any Jetpack paying customers who have to go through the same situation. Without support from Jetpack, due to their looping back to say you’re not logged in, you’re left in the dark. Wondering what’s causing the issue. And the memory issue leads you down the wrong path to resolve the issue.