WordPress 5.2 and later has a neat new feature that may catch you by surprise the first time you see it. If one of your plugins should crash or throw any kind of an error, you will find something like the following in your email inbox:
Howdy!
Since WordPress 5.2 there is a built-in feature that detects when a plugin or theme causes a fatal error on your site, and notifies you with this automated email.
In this case, WordPress caught an error with one of your plugins, Name of Plugin.
First, visit your website (https://www.yourwebsite.com/) and check for any visible issues. Next, visit the page where the error was caught (https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/edit.php?page=some-plugin) and check for any visible issues.
This is telling you what plugin or theme seemed to be causing the error and where to go to check for errors.
Please contact your host for assistance with investigating this issue further.
If your site appears broken and you can’t access your dashboard normally, WordPress now has a special “recovery mode”. This lets you safely login to your dashboard and investigate further.
https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php?action=enter_recovery_mode&rm_token=fzmHM2xuXdW6DktOzYwDis&rm_key=i5zk24RAdiIrZLypkbYXC1
To keep your site safe, this link will expire in 1 day. Don’t worry about that, though: a new link will be emailed to you if the error occurs again after it expires.
If the error renders your wordpress login and dashboard pages useless, this temporary link can help you get around it.
When seeking help with this issue, you may be asked for some of the following information:
WordPress version 5.3.2
Current theme: Some Theme (version 1.57)
Current plugin: Some Plugin (version 1.0.0)
PHP version 7.3.11
Error Details
=============
An error of type E_ERROR was caused in line 839 of the file /home/someuser/domains/yourwebsite.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/someplugin/includes/google/vendor/google/apiclient/src/Google/Client.php. Error message: Uncaught InvalidArgumentException: file does not exist in /home/someuser/domains/yourwebsite.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/someplugin/includes/google/vendor/google/apiclient/src/Google/Client.php:839
Stack trace:
#0 /home/someuser/domains/yourwebsite.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/someplugin/admin/class-schedule-and-appraisal-admin.php(454): Google_Client->setAuthConfig(‘/home/someuser/…’)
…
etc.
etc.
Here they provide a whole bunch of potentially useful information so don’t immediately discard it just because you do not understand it. This information is likely to be very useful to the person(s) that wrote the offending plugin or theme file so please forward it to them. If you need help figuring this out, please let us know by opening a ticket and we will be happy to point you in the right direction.