WordPress support for a German timber merchant's site

The client is a German timber merchant with a WordPress site on a purchased theme with Elementor, run by a marketing agency.

There were two cases. In 2025 an admin page never finished loading. In 2026 the admin locked completely, and after that the updates kept failing. I worked on both alone, and each time the agency got an account of what I did, what I measured and what was still not confirmed.

Projects

1. 2025

   WordPress admin bug diagnosis

   In the WordPress admin the widgets page never finished loading. The site is built on a purchased theme that cannot run without its own core plugin.

   On a local copy I switched plugins off one by one. A plugin that turns off the block editor had hidden the real error: a broken block from the theme’s core plugin in the main sidebar. I wrote a small snippet that removes only that plugin’s widgets in the admin and leaves the vendor’s commercial code alone. The widgets page opened fast, and the public pages looked the same.

   The catch was that those widgets could no longer be edited in the admin, and I told the agency so. They got two options: apply the workaround or dig deeper. Three weeks later I repeated the theme vendor’s support steps on a backup copy. The cause stayed in the core plugin, so I recommended a clean install with plugins added step by step.

   The agency had the cause and a workaround that worked, and the live site was their call.

   Stack: WordPress, Elementor, PHP

2. 2026

   WordPress admin lockout and update failures

   The WordPress admin failed on every page. I got it back, then looked into why updates, security updates included, stopped going through the agency’s update tool.

   Once the login for the right server was confirmed, I switched the failing plugin off over FTP, and the admin opened again. I ran the pending updates over FTP too, and reinstalled the update tool’s connector by hand after the normal update hung. The error text showed a locked upgrade folder, so I removed it. A debug log had grown to 1 GB, and I archived it.

   To see why updates kept failing, I wrote a temporary script that measured disk, PHP memory, scheduled tasks, database writes and admin load time. A test that writes one line per second was cut off nine times, well before the 300 second limit. That pointed to something outside PHP ending the requests. I wrote the request for the host with the numbers and the exact settings to check, and marked the cause as not yet confirmed.

   The agency was back in WordPress, with the pending updates applied and the connector current.

   Stack: WordPress, PHP