Site Kit breaks WordPress

Hi @bchabot,

Thanks for reaching out. The “There has been a critical error on this website.Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.” message you’re encountering is a generic WordPress error. While in your case it’s appearing within the Analytics widget on the Site Kit dashboard we can hopefully help determine the cause. In order to do so, please share the following:

1. Your Site Health information. You can use this form to share privately if preferred. Please enable Site Kit once more before sharing this.
2. When you mention this doesn’t occur from an incognito browsing session, do this occur consistently when using a regular browsing session if using Chrome?
3. Do you see any warnings or errors when checking your Site Health status (Tools > Site Health > Status), which differs from your Site Health information requested above? Such errors may include REST endpoint references.

One we have the above we can provide some troubleshooting suggestions. Let me know if you have any questions with the above.

1. Sent.
2. I log in to my account with admin privs. I activate Site Kit. I navigate to the site home page and the generic error is al;l I see for any page not in the wp-admin area. In Incognito mode the site seems to function fine. In a regular window, I log out of my account and navigate to the site’s home page and all works properly.
3. No warnings. No errors. 5 Recommended Improvements including a 500 error on REST API that might be related to the WordFence Security plugin setting “Prevent discovery of usernames through ‘/?author=N’ scans, the oEmbed API, the WordPress REST API, and WordPress XML Sitemaps ” being active.

Oh, hey! I found a SECOND “Reset Site Kit” button inside of the Tools/Available Tools page. (I had been using the one in the Site Kit/Settings page.) This time it looks like it worked but now gives me the message after that “Your site may not be ready for Site Kit
Site Kit cannot access the WordPress REST API. Please ensure it is enabled on your site.”

Here begins the rabbit hole….

I disable the “Prevent discovery of usernames” setting and no change. I did some digging on the 500 error and apparently others have had issues with php running out of memory. My php.ini was set to “memory_limit = 128M” since I installed it initially. I changed it as suggested here and now it works.

What I want to know is what changed in the last week to make this all not work? It all worked fine before.

Many thanks for the update, very useful insights.

If the error doesn’t appear when browsing with incognito Chrome can you share what browser you regularly use, and the extensions you have active (ie. Any AdBlocker or other extensions)? I can then check for the same experience.

If we can’t determine any issues at browser level we can then perform a check using the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin, which you already have active. I mention this as I can see a couple of security plugins active, which could result in REST related errors with particular configuration.

Update: Based on the latest error after resetting Site Kit, please do let me know if the same warning appears from a Chrome browser incognito window, while also sharing what browser you use regularly when these REST related errors started appearing.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 4 months ago by James Osborne.

As we didn’t receive a response I’ll mark this as resolved. Feel free to open a new support topic if you continue to encounter issues, or reopen this topic and we’d be happy to assist.