Cannot update to WP 4.9.6

Hello, N’Ckyola, & welcome. This looks like a multisite install, am I correct regarding that? If so, then you need to be certain you’re signed in as the superadmin, else you won’t be able to perform the upgrade.

If you’re unsure whether or not this is indeed a multisite installation, open wp-config.php in your hosting provider’s file manager. You’ll see lines like this:
define( ‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true );
&/or
define(‘MULTISITE’, true);

There may well be others.

If you do not need multisite, then I’d urge you to delete these lines, as multisite is technically a bit more challenging than a single install of WordPress.

Hi. It is multisite, yes. I have never had a problem with my upgrades before. I also only have 1 login & it is Super Admin.

Any other ideas?

N’Ckyola, I’ve looked at your site a bit, & I can’t help but wonder why you’ve set this up as a multisite? It appears to me as though you contribute the vast majority of the material on the blog. It also does not appear to me that anyone else has a site there. Multisite, in cases like this, only adds an unnecessary layer of complexity–& that = more hair pulling lol.

Plese let us know what sort of hosting you have, ie, shared, dedicated, or VPS. This will assist us in instructing you as to how best to solve this problem.

Hi Jackie. It’s shared hosting for now. A little history…

When I started out I only had my business page & when I started the blog it was on .com not .org.

Moving over to .org, I did not originally start out with a multisite install BUT my blog was also tied to my business page (instead of blog.xby… it was the standard xby…/blog). Unfortunately I had to change that in order to do campaigns or get sponsorship of any kind.

That’s when I went to multisite so that I could share content across the network so the feel is different but similar “enough” – different themes, shared plugins, shared media, etc.

I found it too much to do on multiple different sites and, as a tech geek, preferred the idea of managing everything from 1 place.

Again, thisis the very first time I’ve ever had an issue with updating anything really, esp. WordPress core. Wondering if a plugin is interfering.

Edited to add: Actually I created a ticket for Cloudflare and noticed that the same error is causing issues there as well. From support “the failure is not happening in Cloudflare, but in the WordPress PHP running the plugin”. I will troubleshoot more to determine plugin issues.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by N'Ckyola.

Hello again, N’Ckyola. Thanks for the info. The fact that you’re on shared hosting is instructive, because now we don’t have to pursue file permissions issues, etc, as would be required for a VPS or dedicated server.

One thing you may wish to consider is opening your wp-config.php & changing wp_debug from ‘false’ to ‘true’. This is a security risk so please change it back when you’ve finished visiting/logging into your site to see any errors it might be throwing.

Additionally, if your hosting provider supports it, you can go into your control panel, where there is an aplet to show site errors. & lastly, there are always error.log or error-log or error_log files in your WordPress installation folder as well as their subfolders. These may contain relevant info, & you should feel free to paste anything you might view as pertinent to your next reply. That would likely include entries around the time the errors were occurring.

Lastly, what PHP version are you running? That can have a big impact as well.

I have actually been running in debug mode since yesterday while troubleshooting. Ironically nothing is popping up. PHP version is 7.1.1.

I mentioned that I was using CloudFlare. I have been in contact with them – to no avail, of course – and my host, who pointed me back to Cloudflare. So now I have:
1. completed deactivated all my plugins except 1
2. put my sites into maintenance mode
3. pointed my name servers back to my host default (since they said they couldn’t do anything because I was pointing to Cloudflare servers)

Even with all that, the update fails.
I am now going back to my host so they can troubleshoot. I could just not update, but I don’t like that option – bad things happen when I’m not on the most up to date versions.

Since no one seemed to have an answer for this issue, I ended up having to completely open up the permissions on the wp-admin/admin-ajax.php file.

I set the permissions to 777 in my file manager, ran the WP core update, and reset the permissions back to 644.

WP is now updated and all my permissions are back to normal. I still would like to know the root cause of this issue since it’s never happened to me before (since 2013). But for now I guess I can called it resolved.

N’Ckyola, does your hosting provider have an aplet in its control panel for you to look at errors? Also, did you see any files called error.log or error_log in your file manager? Lastly, have you asked your host if perchance there were any mod_security errors that fired on your site, especially around the time of updating.