As you probably know, this website runs on Wordpress, a nifty content management tool that powers something like 1/3 of the world’s websites. WordPress uses themes to organize content and plugins to make those themes (and the base WordPress platform) more fit for a web designer’s specific purpose.
You might also know that last week Google sent emails to webmasters around the world, telling them that their sites were unsuited for mobile devices, and that this would start affecting search results. We all consume more content on phones and tablets and it’s really not that hard to accommodate. In fact, I added a nifty plugin and we were off …
Then it got complicated. Google also didn’t love Schnitger Corp.’s site loading time so, since we’re all about the customer experience here, making things faster seemed like another good idea. Off I went. Another plugin. This one promised that it was a “very simple plugin that allows you to quickly compress and GZip your site. Only Works On Apache Servers (almost all WordPress installs are on Apache Servers). This will give you the ability to increase your speed and possibly even your rank in Google from a speed increase”. Sounds good but …
Here things went horribly wrong. WordPress plugins are downloaded onto the server, then installed, then activated. Something in that chain led deleted important stuff that caused a dreaded 500 error:
(Our message said to contact webmaster A T schnitgercorp D O T com but you get the idea.)
Not helpful. In the least. Starting to panic: If we can identify that one thing has been deleted, what else is missing or compromised in some way?
Then an email arrived from the plugin’s developers, saying that we might see problems after installing the plugin and telling us to replace one file with another. And to send them our FTP login credentials so they could take a look and make a quick fix. Finally, the clincher: “If you are unhappy with your current site speed or server setup, we invite you to give us a try. We … consider your business to be a valuable resource, not a bother.” Call me cynical, but rendering something unusable and then offering to fix it all for a fee isn’t legit. We won’t even talk about the phishing potential of the FTP login info.
After poking around, contacting the hosting company and generally going a bit nuts, it became obvious: restore from the backup.
And that’s what we did. After hours of showing the world the 500 error, we’re back! Yay!
The lessons:
If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Many WordPress plugins are great, simple little tools but this one promised just a bit too much in order to get people like me to download it, setting up the potential FTP credentials/pay-to-fix scheme.
Check everything. If I had bothered to look beyond the star rating for the plugin, I would have seen that 500 error reported by a number of other downloaders.
Don’t take on something you can’t back out of. I have no idea how to fix a 500 error and am lucky that the backup worked — without that …. Shudder.
Don’t do what I did!
The site may be a bit wonky — sorry — so please send an email to let us know. We’ll get back to work on making the site faster when we’ve recovered from this adventure.
