Hi @touchscreendoc,
The problem
The reason this problem is occurring is because your website is out of memory.
This is caused by many factors, and when manipulating multiple images for WooCommerce (for Open Graph), this was just a little to much for your website to handle.
Thus a 500 error: the white screen of death.
The memory usage of the image manipulation shouldn’t be at such a height: there are many other factors at play. One of which are the many errors being generated by other plugins, which drastically affects performance.
Let’s get to solving this issue:
Step 1
First, please make sure all your plugins are up-to-date. One plugin in particular hasn’t been updated for over 4 years ?? This is where all the errors come from.
Running outdated plugins are also a major security concern.
That plugin, in particular, is for HTTPS.
You can simply force your website to become HTTPS-only in a much more elegant and faster and lighter way. We’re talking about 20000x faster (I tested that conclusion this almost 3 years ago), and 100% fewer memory usage by that plugin – because it’s not active anymore.
This is what you need to add to your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
You can place this on top of the file. As always, keep a back-up, just in case.
If “RewriteEngine On” is already set, you can remove the second occurrence.
Step 2
An image is being manipulated on that page. This is done by The SEO Framework for Open Graph image editing and processing.
Now, this is quite a normal process. But your server, especially because of all the deprecation and other errors from the HTTPS plugin, is being overloaded.
This overloading is done by just 20kB, out of ~256,000kB. So we’ve just overstepped the boundary.
So step 2… is step 1.
Moreover
I see you’re running various plugins that were awesome in WordPress 3.8. But now WordPress covers that lot: much better and without expensive actions.
One example is “Disable Comments”, this can be handled through the first 3 options of wp-admin/options-discussion.php.
Another redundant plugin is “Add Admin CSS” – which is nice… but that also might just be another cause for “the last straw that broke the camel’s back”.
And another is “Simple Custom CSS”, which is now neatly done by WordPress 4.7 through Customizer ??
Now, there are a few more things that can be improved, but I think I covered the basics of it already.
Best of luck optimizing! Cheers ??
P.S. Upgrading to PHP7 will cut the overall memory usage by threefold, but that upgrade might be a little to much work and a great cause of headaches looking at the dated plugins.
