We are experiencing issues with two of our WordPress sites when trying to save pages. Our standard setup is as follows:
- WordPress version 5.3.2
- ACF plugin version 5.8.7
- Classic Editor plugin version 1.5
- Wordfence and iThemes Security plugins
We have custom ACF fields on our post/page templates.
Recently, when we try to update/save a page, we are redirected to https://<domain>.com/wp-admin/post.php instead of https://<domain>.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=11&action=edit, and the changes are not saved.
As a test, we tried deactivating the Classic Editor plugin and reverted to the Gutenberg editor, and we are able to update the main content/body of a page. However, any changes made to the custom ACF fields are not saved and the “Update” button just sits on “Updating”, even though we receive a notification in the bottom left corner to say the page has been updated.
Do you guys have any suggestions on how we can troubleshoot and/or resolve this issue?
try disabling wordfence and security plugin and see if that corrects the issue.
try reinstalling ACF (download from your account and upload to the site)
try reinstalling WP update
I know that this is not an issue with WP/ACF/Classic Editor. All of my sites run this combo and I’m not seeing any issues.
Hi John,
We have tried disabling the security plugins to no avail, but we haven’t tried re-installing the ACF plugin. If we re-install the plugin, will we need to re-create all of the custom fields and data?
Any idea why the ACF fields are working with the Gutenburg editor?
No, you won’t need to recreate data.
Generally when things like this happen a file got corrupted in some way. I would just upload the ACF files using FTP to make sure everything is in working order.
Hello, was just wondering if this issue was ever resolved? We are seeing a similar problem and it’s very occasional but very annoying. We can’t seem to track it down.
Hi spacecats,
We managed to track down the issue after an exhaustive investigation.
The issue was caused by a rule in the OWASP ModSecurity ruleset in WHM/cPanel; we had to disable the following rule:
REQUEST-949-BLOCKING-EVALUATION
After disabling that rule we had no further issues with saving posts or other entries in WordPress.
