It may be partly my fault.
Awhile back I was having some issues with the site and it turned out the fancy newer version of PHP was causing some problems. I’m still not sure why, because WordPress supports the latest version. But whatever, I’m not a webologist. It was rolled back to version 5 and the issue went away.
Then a plugin update became available and said it couldn’t update because it needed PHP 7. Well. I investigated and found out I can switch the site from versions 5 and 7 through the control panel. I did this, updated the plugin (the real impetus was to clear that update notification badge) and all is well.
But not quite!
Because now the site is acting up (or down) again. This means that sometimes you’ll hit the site and see this:
When you see the above appears to be arbitrary. You may never see it. You may see it every time. It’s like my own site’s version of a lootbox, the costs measured in how many times you need to refresh the page (which fixes the issue).
Because most people/bots are just going to move on rather than refresh to see what happens, I suspect the trickle of visitors to the site basically stopped for June 21 and 22. (For added fun, I sometimes see similar errors when loading the admin dashboard. Fortunately a refresh fixes this, too.)
I am too lazy to put a lot of time into further investigation into fixing this and suspect my hosting service wouldn’t have much to offer, either, so I’ll just live with it until it either goes away on its own or I get fed up and rollback to version 5 of PHP.
Anyway, that’s my theory for why my site got two days of absolutely no visits, proving such a thing can happen on today’s internet. I will never become a social media influencer if this keeps happening. 🙁
Bonus annoyance: I went to choose the category and tags for this post, but sometimes these fail to load, too. Maybe I will roll back after all…
UPDATE: I rolled back to PHP 5. At least now people should be able to reliably see my carefully curated selection of amusing cat images.
