Several weeks ago I and other users discovered that our sites had crashed to white screens. I had to go in via ftp to disable all my plugins because I couldn’t get into my site. I started to enable one plugin at a time and discovered that the Kirki developer plugin was the culprit, and it took hours to get back into my site after that. After searching out this on forums, it was clear that that latest two Kirki versions had an error in a file url. I found the older Kirki version, downloaded it and was able to get the site up.

But everything inside of the internal wp pages and posts are a mess. The nice blocks I had from WPBakery plus Codeless are just a single page of a jumble of html and css with other stuff all mixed in. Customizer no longer works on the front end. The home page is sort of there, but all shifted to the left side of the screen, most everything I won’t be able to fix unless I just start over again.

The developer of Handel refused to update the WPBakery plugin for almost 2 years. Everyday I got errors from WordFence that this plugin was risky and needed to be updated. I begged for the developer of Handel to fix it, but they told me that WPBakery works just fine without the update. So I finally bought my own licensed version. I paid a developer to build me a child site and install my licensed version. He really messed up the child site and never installed my licensed version of WPBakery.

So now I am trying to rebuild the Handel site using flywheel local on my desktop. But WPBakery is not allowing to use all the extras that come with the paid license on the local development, claiming that I can’t use it because there is already a website using it. It’s the same site, just in a local development environment.

This site is for a financial advisor and the SEC has very specific guidelines for advisory websites I must ensure are working correctly. Part of the website is not displaying a form correctly and that is critical that it shows up to the public.

I have a full time job and websites like this are something I do on the side for non profits or older adults with businesses. I just don’t have the time to spend hours fighting about how I am going to develop this site all over again. It’s dreadful to be caught with major plugins that were critical to the site being out of date and unusable.

I liked working with WPBakery and Codeless together. The blocks were easy to use and it made the development tidy looking. That’s been destroyed into just a mess of a single page of html and css all jumbled together. Using developer tools on line is a bit helpful, at least I can find out the fonts I used and what some of the margins were set to. But sometimes I can’t even find where those need to be set to in the the mess.

I don’t know what to do now. But I do know I will never buy another Themeforest theme again. The bundles are worthless if they don’t update the plugins.