The release of WordPress 6.4 has unfortunately caused some websites to crash for a specific group of users. Publishers and developers who updated to 6.4 and use a popular page builder plugin like Beaver Builder, Oxygen, Cornerstone have found that their sites display a fatal error and won’t load properly.
This issue seems to only occur when the legacy WordPress default themes are active in addition to the page builder. Once the connection was made, the teams behind the page builder jumped into action to identify the bug causing the conflict.
While the page builder creator’s work on a fix, affected users are downgrading to previous versions of WordPress to restore website functionality. It’s an inconvenient workaround for now, but the developers are optimistic they can pinpoint and patch the problematic code quickly.
The WordPress community has come together to rapidly spread awareness and support one another as always. Discussion boards are buzzing as users share their experiences and programmers collaborate to get to the bottom of the 6.4 incompatibility. Page builder customers can likely expect an update to resolve the crashes very soon.
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WordPress 6.4 was released on November 7, 2023, and some users have reported issues with their sites crashing or becoming inaccessible after updating. The problems seem to primarily affect sites using popular page builder plugins like Oxygen, Cornerstone, Beaver Builder, and Brizy.
Many site owners have taken to the WordPress support forums to complain that after updating to 6.4, their pages built with these page builders are completely blank, showing just a white screen. Some report getting fatal PHP errors, while others can no longer access their WordPress admin dashboard.
Clearly there is some incompatibility between the page builders and something in the new 6.4 update that is causing conflicts and making sites unstable or unreachable for some users.
The root cause of the issues with page builders seems to be some under-the-hood changes in how WordPress 6.4 handles full site editing.
Full site editing allows you to edit all areas of your site visually using blocks, similar to how you can build pages with page builder plugins. This full site editing functionality is slowly being rolled out and improved in the core WordPress software.
WordPress 6.4 contained some significant updates to full site editing, including changes to the templating system. Unfortunately, these changes seem to conflict with how the popular page builder plugins integrate with WordPress.
Since page builders like Oxygen, Cornerstone essentially take over the editing and templating of your WordPress site, the changes in WordPress 6.4 likely broke that integration, causing blank pages and fatal errors for some users.
The page builder developers are reportedly working on updates to make their plugins fully compatible with WordPress 6.4. But in the meantime, some users are finding that downgrading to the previous 6.3 version of WordPress resolves the issues for now.
Overall, this seems to illustrate the challenges of balancing innovation with stability, as major software updates like WordPress 6.4 can sometimes introduce regressions or breakage, despite extensive testing. For site owners using page builders, it may be prudent to wait a bit before updating to the latest WordPress release.
