Publishing failed. The response is not a valid JSON response.

Hello @oumz99,

If you exclude potential plugin conflicts and server misconfiguration, this error usually happens if there is a firewall, firewall blocks some JSON paths and then you get that error. Review if you have a firewall and disable it temporarily – to see will the issue disappears. If it’s not a firewall then you need to check these things:

• Incorrect site URL settings. Mismatched WordPress site address settings can disrupt JSON responses.
• Plugin conflicts. Incompatible or poorly coded WordPress plugins may interfere with the JSON response.
• Server configuration issues. Server-side problems or insufficient resources can lead to this error.
• SSL/mixed content problems. Mixed content from HTTP and HTTPS elements can prevent proper JSON communication.
• Permalink structure issues. Improper permalink settings can affect how URLs are handled, causing JSON errors.

Kind regards.

I am now getting “Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON response” all the time. It started today.

I haven’t changed any settings related to this so I have to assume that WordPress or some plugin changed and is creating this error.

It also does not appear to be Permalink or Firewall related.

Bryan Eggers
VegasPublicity.com

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by Bryan Eggers.

There’s two ways of finding out what is going wrong.

First, user your browsers developer tools to see what the response is. As it says that it’s not valid JSON, that normally means that there’s been a server error and that’s what’s returned. What you see in the response may be generic if you don’t have debugging turned on, so you might need to do the second step as well.

To find out what any errors are enable debugging, and it’s also a good idea to enable the debugging log which will log any error messages that you are getting from the server. That will show you exactly what the error is and where it’s occurring.

Thanks for the information. Sadly, I am 75 years old with a brain tumor and unable to do troubleshooting anymore. However, if someone wants to volunteer to check my site, let me know and I’ll send you the logon codes.

Also, yesterday I didn’t get an error message all day. Not sure what’s happening.

Thanks!

First thing…

Do NOT ever send logins or any other sensitive information to anyone on this site for any reason! That includes myself any admins or mods or just anyone at all.

Now that that’s out ofo the way… If there’s no issues now there’s a good chance that the server was overloaded and dropped your requests around that time. It does happen, and it’s hard to diagnose.

If it happens again I’d say to hire a professional to help you. You can post small jobs like this at https://jobs.wordpress.net/ and get help that way.

The error messages have been back again for the last two days. One thing I noticed is that the error messages let the articles be published anyway.

If the errors dont’ happen all the time but only sometimes, it sounds more like a server issue. If the server is overloaded by your site or any other site(s) it can throw errors like this.

Again, there’s no way to tell what is going on from here as everything is on your server, and no one here has any access to it whatsoever.

To find out what the errors are you need to do what I suggested initially and do some debugging. Unless you can do that, or find someone professional to do that for you, you’ll never be able to know what the actual problem is that needs fixing.