Two days ago everything about a particular website was working fine – with all plugins active and everything current, I was able to log in with Firefox (my normal browser) and edit content. But today, any attempt to access the back-end just hangs – the Network tab in Firefox’s dev tools shows many files loaded, but the window is just white and the browser thinks stuff is still loading…forever. Interestingly, it doesn’t even time out – I ate lunch and came back and it was still in the same state with no error message in the browser.
I’ll save you the story of the troubleshooting I went through for hours (as drastic as restoring the site from backup at one point!), but the conclusion is that this only happens under a very specific set of circumstances:
- Only Firefox (Chrome is fine; I didn’t test any other browser)
- Only when WPForms is active (if just that one plugin is deactivated, there are no problems)
- Only when logged in (if logged out, I can see the login form, but once I log in, it hangs accessing the dashboard or any other part of the admin area)
- Only this site (I administer another site with WPForms, and it works okay even in Firefox)
Firefox is at version 80.0.1, but I upgraded to that version four days ago, BEFORE the last time I was able to use the WP back-end successfully. WPForms, WP core, and all other plugins and themes were current when I used the site two days ago. What in the world could be going on? Any suggestions of how to pinpoint the issue and fix it?