One of my longest clients sends me a message today about her website where each time she wanted to edit one of her pages, an error with a message of Fatal ERROR: Allowed memory size exhausted leaving her unable to update her website. Good thing the error tells us about where the error is and that is the start of finding the right solution, but unfortunately, the line that was mentioned was not in fault.
So the crisis began!
Each time that WordPress gives you an error, you have to make sure that you try the basic troubleshooting methods.
1. Restore your website from a backup – good thing we already have this one, but it didn’t fix the problem
2. Uninstall all of your plugins
3. Switch to a different theme.
Those 3 are the most common troubleshooting techniques for most WordPress issues. But still, it doesn’t solve the problem, then the last resource is to check your website server/hosting in which maybe it hasn’t been updated for a while, and for my client’s case. The PHP version wasn’t upgraded for a long time. The fix was very easy.
1. Go to your cPanel account.
2. Look for Software Section
3. Click “PHP Version” or similar
4. Select from the dropdown and select the second highest version. (as of today, the second highest is 7.0)
5. Click save.
6. Refresh your website.
But if you can’t find your PHP version, simply call your hosting provider and I am sure that they would gladly help you upgrade your PHP version. In case they won’t, switch to different hosting. My website is hosted in HostGator.