YoastSEO Crashes Block Editor
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Hello and thanks for your time; apologies in advance for the long post, but I’m trying to give you as much info as I figure you’re going to ask for anyway ??
I’m following up on a tweet I sent a couple of weeks ago about YSEO breaking the block editor. I have since done some fiddling around testing and plugging things in and unplugging them, and this is my observation:
I can not reliably narrow down a conflicting plugin. I am using a pretty good sized stack of them, with a woocommerce implementation and a wpforo forum as well plus a bunch of other stuff under the hood, but I went through one at a time turning them all back on, one at a time, off and on with and without Yoast, etc. Oddly if I go into troubleshooting mode while running the “health check & troubleshooting” plugin and then enable all current plugins…it works, right until I move it out of troubleshooting mode.
I did note some anomalous behavior that I couldn’t reliably reproduce. For instance, if I disable the wpforo plugin AND yoastseo, and then turn yoastseo back on, it SOMETIMES works ONCE, but a second attempt brings me back to one of the three “death” variants (empty screen, fatal error notice, or endless blue circle that never finishes loading).
Here’s what’s consistent:
– If yoast is not running any post of any type with or without any kind of pre-existing content will load properly in the block editor.
– if yoast IS running, the block editor will fail roughly 98% of the time.
– toggling and mixing-matching various plugins and plugin sets will sometimes “jostle” proper functionality out of the thing for a minute, meaning occasionally I’ll turn something off or on and I can get the BE to load ONCE, but not AGAIN, even if no changes were made between load attempts in any of the post content or the plugin load
– Without yoast, the BE loads and works as expected consistently with any one of dozens of various plugin sets including everything I’ve got running *except* YoastSEO.
– this is probably important: *I have the same problem with other major SEO plugins.* I use Yoast by default and have for many years – would pay for it if I could – but just as part of trying to suss this out I did try other tools like All In One SEO and a couple of the other “big” well known plugins for these purposes, and they all crash and burn on the block editor but work find on the classic editor.Here’s a little bit of server info for you, if it helps:
WordPress Version 5.8.2 Debug Mode Disabled PHP Version 7.3.32 MainWP Child Version 4.1.8 PHP Memory Limit 1024M MySQL Version 5.7.23-23YSEO version 17.5. Server’s running on apache, I don’t remember the version right this second. I *did* try changing PHP versions as I notice several are only “certified” to PHP7.2, but 7.3 is the lowest version my host makes available. Functionality doesn’t seem to change between 7.3 and 7.4; with 8, the only other option, the whole site just dies – I assume the WP codebase is nowhere near ready for it. (Is it possible that I’m just hitting a memory limit, that all my other plugins together don’t push it over that 1G limit, but taking any one of them out and putting Yoast in does? Seems excessive…)
This is a hosted space via my own reseller account with whoever owns midphase this week, so I don’t have REAL root but can give you what access you may need either directly through the site or through the WPadmin site I use to manage all of my “properties” (mostly subdomains for screwing around and testing stuff), after proper handshaking/ID validation of course. It *is* a live site ?? and I’m a bad developer because it’s all “government work,” I get lazy and don’t bother with staging/testing.
I’m not a complete fool (in spite of what I just said) and did quite a bit of coding back in the day, but frankly I’m about 8 years rusty and don’t even know where to start looking for sure for meaningful error codes/logs, but am happy to do what I can with whatever guidance you can offer and give you whatever access you need. I backup regularly with UpdraftPlus, so worst case scenario I can throw in a fresh install and restore the site from there.
Look forward to hearing from you. I’m a huge fan both of the YoastSEO tool and the block editor and all the great tools it opens up, and I’m eager to get back to work at full speed!
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PS: also tried toggling various in-app switches like readability check, no love. Even crashes “page” editing when I have the “page” type excluded from the plugin. Also, sometimes it will crash the dashboard page for no discernible reason. (It’s doing this now on my site even though I’ve changed nothing since I originally wrote this comment.) Other areas of the admin section appear to work as normal, just the dashboard site.
Is there perhaps some data being pulled from somewhere common to the dashboard widget and the block editor that maybe my site is being slow about and that’s causing the hangups?
Hate edit timeouts on this forum ?? So an update for the Blubrry Powerpress podcasting package rolled out and autoupdated behind my back. Since that also adds content to the dashboard, I disabled it. Dashboard’s back so that one’s not on Yoast. Now keeping in mind that *I have tried this specific test repeatedly*, I deactivate Powerpress and…everything works. Turn it back on and it doesn’t. Turn it back on without Yoast and it it does.
I’m not sure how the etiquette works these days but I’m going to try to reach out in their direction and point them at this thread as well. It’s definitely possible that I’m just incompetent at this point…but it seems very, very likely to me that there’s a specific conflict happening between these two plugins, possibly in specific configurations, that causes the (standard, with widgets from various plugins) WP admin dashboard to intermittently break and the block editor to *always* break.
I’m going to try a couple of toggles with powerpress after I track them down and link them here, and will follow up.
— followup —
First, I did start a topic on the Powerpress support forum so hopefully they’ll see this. I did some testing, just to see what would happen.
– currently, with the latest build of Powerpress that dropped a couple of hours ago (call it…2000gmt-ish/4pmEST?) neither my WP dashboard area nor my block editor will work.
— I tried disabling the various in-process tools like dashboard widgets, toggling off tools in the block editor, etc. Even with those tools toggled off, the effected pages will not load with both plugins enabled.
I can work around this for now for my purposes, now that I know what the problem is; I just have to rather inconveniently toggle powerpress off and on to use the block editor and will have to fumble around with the classic editor to publish podcasts until a fix is found. The dashboard problem is inconvenient but I don’t spend a ton of my worktime on that page proper anyway, and all other functionality (except the block editor) appears to be functioning as normal with both plugins activated. This includes all admin and settings pages specific to both plugins.
Sorry, I know this is convoluted and ultimately probably affects three people on the whole planet…but I know how this kind of thing can sit dormant and bite you later when you think the problem is “solved” because the few people impacted just moved on instead. I don’t really have the spoons to do things like load up AIOSEO and try THAT with and without Powerpress, etc., but the earlier-mentioned fact that this error appears to impact basically any full-functioned SEO plugin may give a clue as to what’s causing it and why it appears to be limited specifically to interacting with something Powerpress is doing (although it may not be limited to them either; I’m just one person with one setup).
I hope all this noise helps, please let me know if there is specific information I can track down or add for you. The one thing I *haven’t* done is set up a testing domain with JUST these two plugins to see how THAT plays out and if maybe there’s yet a third problem; I figure if we hit a dead end here then that’s a next-step testing tactic I can try.
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