The WordPress “technical issue” email: what it means and what to do

What does the WordPress “technical issue” email mean?

The WordPress technical issue email means a plugin or theme crashed your site with a fatal error, and WordPress caught it. Since version 5.2, WordPress notices which plugin or theme caused the crash and emails the site’s admin a private link into recovery mode.

The subject line names your site in brackets, then reads Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue. On our lab it went to the address set as the Administration Email Address under Settings, General.

What does the email say?

The one our lab sent had four useful parts:

1. The culprit. “WordPress caught an error with one of your plugins”, followed by the plugin’s name.
2. Two places to look: your website, and “the page where the error was caught”. Ours was /wp-admin/.
3. The recovery mode link, a long login address with action=enter_recovery_mode and two one time codes in it.
4. The error details: WordPress version, active theme, the plugin, the PHP version, then the error type, the file and the line number.

Keep the last part. Whoever fixes the plugin will want the file and line before anything else.

What do visitors see in the meantime?

One line: “There has been a critical error on this website.” WordPress’s troubleshooting guide quotes a longer version. On our lab that one showed on admin screens, and it adds “Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.”

On our lab the visitor’s version had no mention of the email at all. So the person who reports the problem is often a customer, and they cannot see who to tell.

How do you use the recovery mode link?

Click it. Our lab showed “Recovery Mode Initialized. Please log in to continue.” Log in with an administrator account.

WordPress’s core team explains what happens next. Recovery mode “works by placing a cookie on the current client”, and the broken plugin is paused for that browser only. In their words, pausing “does not have any global implications.”

We saw exactly that on the lab. With the recovery cookie, the home page loaded normally. In a second browser with no cookie, the same address still returned the critical error.

So recovery mode is a way in, not the fix.

What do you do once you are in?

Deactivate the plugin or theme the email named, then open the site in a private window. If it loads for a stranger, the site is back up.

Then, before you turn that plugin on again:

• Check whether an update ran just before the crash. The plugin’s changelog may say what changed.
• Send the error details from the email to the plugin’s support, with the WordPress and PHP versions.
• If the site has a staging copy, test the fix there first.

Exiting recovery mode wipes the cookie and will “cause all extensions to run as usual again”, according to the core team, so do not exit until the plugin is deactivated.

Why does the email sometimes never arrive?

Three reasons we check, in this order.

The address. The email goes to the Administration Email Address in Settings, General. On older sites that can be an inbox nobody reads anymore.

Spam. Search for your site’s name in the spam folder before you decide it never came.

Where it crashed. On our lab, a crash on the home page alone sent nothing. The email arrived when the error also broke /wp-admin/. If only your front end is down, open /wp-admin/ yourself and check the inbox again.

What if there is no email at all?

Then the error log is the next step. The critical error guide on developer.wordpress.org says to check your email first, then turn on debugging in wp-config.php and read wp-content/debug.log for the specific error.

That means editing files over SFTP or the host’s file manager. If that is not something you want to do on a live site, it is the kind of fix our WordPress maintenance plan covers.

For a site that is down right now, send us the email WordPress sent you and we will tell you what it points to.