The site is experiencing technical difficulties. Please check your admin email

  • Resolved maxmartinw

    (@maxmartinw)


    5 years, 8 months ago

    Hi there, I’m having an issue editing the pages which are in my library. If I got to edit a page using the classic editor the page attributes section shows this error message “The site is experiencing technical difficulties. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.” Also if I head over to settings > Reading I get the same error message. The site is updated to the latest WordPress 5.2.2 and all my plugins are up to date. I only have 10 plugins on the site. I suspect the issue may be the large number of pages on the site. I currently have “48,988” pages which were all created in one batch. Is the error due to the large number of pages or would it be something more technical?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Did you check the site admin email for the Recovery mode link? I’m mostly curious if it was sent, because it sounds like you don’t need it if your failures are in such specific places in the admin and you can continue.
    That message is new in WP 5.2, and it is for catching fatal errors caused by plugins and theme, but it sounds as if it’s an error caused by memory exhaustion or timeout since you have so many pages.

    Why would you want so many pages? Do they all have the same date? Are they all top level or nested? Would it make sense to convert them to Posts?

    Thread Starter maxmartinw

    (@maxmartinw)

    Hi @joyously, I’ve checked the admin email and it appears that there aren’t any messages that may possibly relate to the site. The pages all have the same date and are top level. I don’t think it would be appropriate to convert them to posts I feel it would lose its effectiveness. If it is an error caused by memory exhaustion how would you suggest fixing it?

    Also, I’d like to add before starting this project I couldn’t find evidence anywhere to suggest the maximum number of pages on a WordPress site or any errors being faced once the site reaches so many pages. this is why I went ahead and created the pages.
    Thanks so much for your help!

    The message you’re referring to “The site is experiencing technical difficulties. Please check your admin email” is shown if a fatal PHP error that can be masked happens while the page you’re watching is being created.

    You can still try and see what that particular error is by settings the constants for WP_DEBUG in wp-config.php as described in https://www.ads-software.com/support/article/debugging-in-wordpress/

    My guess is that you hit the memory limit or timeout. In the Classic Editor UI there’s a dropdown to select parent page and I could imagine that some 49000 pages (perhaps with long names) may hit some limits while being created and buffered.

    The two areas you mentioned deal with getting a list of the Pages.
    I don’t think WP was designed to have so many Pages. You can have a huge number of Posts without a problem, as evidenced by www.ads-software.com and wordpress.com.

    You could try raising the PHP memory limit, but even if it had enough memory, the two places you are seeing the problem are not designed to show the user so many results.

    What would be lost in a conversion to Posts? You could keep the same permalinks, and they would be easier to list and categorize. Surely you don’t have them all on a menu?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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