Gutenberg Just Broke my Website

More of a story and vent than an informative article. So to save you reading too much here was my fix:

To fix this error, I disabled the Gutenberg plugin.

Gutenberg Just Broke my Website! This must have been automatically updated by WordPress and broken my website. Funny enough, this only seemed to break my homepage specifically.

Before we start, I’ve also written this on Medium.

It all started when I received an email out the blue from Eugenio Elizondo. Eugenio runs a website design and creation company over at Looma.

Now I receive emails like this all the time, telling me my website is down or broken or needs fixes. Usually followed by them introducing a service for X amount of money.

But this email from Eugenio struck me as different. There were no prices for his services, just a genuine interest in letting me known that my website was down.

So I quickly checked my website from my phone. Bare in mind this was during the school run, so hardly an ideal time to have a website go dark. But sure enough, the browser showed me this:

🫨🫨🫨

I knew I couldn’t do anything to fix it right now. As I mentioned before, I was taking my children to school and wouldn’t be free for the next 30 minutes.

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For the entire walk to and from school, I was thinking of the possible causes and solutions for this. Typically with WordPress, these errors aren’t very serious and are often blown way out of proportion.

I really wish WordPress would have a better failsafe for this stuff. Something like a checker that runs after any automatic upgrades which reverts if issues are detected.

After getting logged into the WordPress admin panel, I checked the other pages and everything else was running just fine.

It was only the homepage that was affected. I say only as if it’s not the single most important page 😆

So I started the usual trick of deactivating plugins one at a time to see if the website came back to live.

I found that disabling the Gutenberg plugin fixed the issue!

And my website went from this:

To this!

Mistakes. Mistakes are the only conclusion I ever seem to come to nowadays.

Either it’s my mistakes or someone else’s. I like to make any negative outcome my mistake and my responsibility but I don’t think there is much I could have done in this regard.

I had monitoring setup for the website, but this was missed. Maybe this is an additional monitoring step I need to implement soon. It’s on the list!

Huge thank you again to Eugenio Elizondo for alerting me to this. I owe you one!