I have ACF installed on my website (https://xlrestorationsoftware.com) as it’s required by my current WordPress theme. I am not using any of the tools with ACF, but for some reason when ACF is installed, it removes some default large purple header banners that are present on every page. I don’t really know why this is, but the Theme developer shared that this ACF plugin is required to remove those ugly headers.
The issue that I have is that when the ACF plugin is active, frequently visitors to the website will experience a page crash where a message simply states: “There has been a critical error on this website. Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.”
In all my troubleshooting, I have narrowed this issue down to the ACF plugin. When I inactivate the plugin, I can no longer reproduce the critical error message when navigating within my website.
Do you have any information that would help me to diagnose why the ACF plugin is crashing the website for visitors?
Advanced Custom Fields – v. 5.10.2 – currently up to date (not the PRO version). All other plugins and my WordPress version are up to date.
First you need to disable the WP Fatal Error Handler by adding this to your wp-config.php file to stop the message.
define('WP_DISABLE_FATAL_ERROR_HANDLER', true);
Then you need to turn on debugging so that you can see what is really going on by adding or editing the following in wp-config.php.
define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', true);