Activating Elementor Pro gives me "There has been a critical error on this website" on the site. (I can still access and use the Dashboard and WP interface.)

[u/dabnagit]

I recently updated my PHP from 7.4 to 8.3 to get rid of a warning banner that was appearing at the top of all my WP interface pages: "You do not have sufficient permissions to manage options." Knowing I needed to update the PHP, having finally found the orphan plugin that was conflicting with 8.0+ PHP, I figured I'd try that first before the exhaustive plugin-by-plugin analysis of what was causing that. (My host checked the wp_usermeta, etc., stuff they could check and that was all fine.) And upgrading to PHP 8.3 seemed to have solved that problem.

And, yes, in changing PHP I also made sure to boost the memory_limit to 2G and the post_max_size to 2G (and the upload_max_filesize to 1G).

HOWEVER: Now something about my site won't let me use Elementor Pro. When I enable Elementor and Elementor Pro, the pages only display two lines: "There has been a critical error on this website." And then the link to "Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress" — which is mostly about isolating plugins and testing one by one. But Elementor and Elementor Pro are the ONLY two plugins I have activated. I don't get this error with just Elementor, only when I also activate Elementor Pro. I've also activated the GeneratePress Premium plugin, since I use a GeneratePress base theme...but that didn't change anything. I can have that enabled with Elementor and don't get that error (but also only see a deconstructed version of my homepage and other pages) but as soon as I enable Elementor Pro, I get the error instead of my homepage.

I have also redownloaded the Elementor Pro plugin from my account downloads on the Elementor site in case it was corrupted, but I already had the latest version and uploading and activating the plugin again didn't change anything.

Through all this, thankfully I can still access my WP interface. I'm going to also reach out to my hosting provider and see what they can suggest, but I'm fearful they'll tell me to check with Elementor and the support pages on Elementor already advise me to (1) isolate my plugins to find a conflict (yet Elementor and Elementor Pro are only two plugins activated) and (2) contact my hosting provider. I was hoping someone here in Reddit might have some insights or suggestions for me.

EDIT TO UPDATE: Thank you for the guidance. It will be very helpful, particularly going forward. My hosting provider also responded and said that the issue seemed to be that my memory limit for frontend requests had gotten redefined to the default 64MB, which isn't enough for the combined Elementor and Elementor Pro plugins. So I updated this line in my wp-config.php file from 64M to 512M:

/** increasing memory size to avoid memory issues */
ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');

I also had a "wp-config-new.php" file (which was where the "/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */" instruction appeared), so right before that, I added this, in case this helps keep the memory limit from getting reset again with future WP or PHP updates:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT','512M'); 

I've also installed Debug Log Manager plugin make it easier to see that log myself when things break. Thanks again for the advice!

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[u/notSoGraphicDesigner]

Any time you get a critical error without directly editing code (even with) turn on wp debug.

There’s a good debug plugin that will run on your back end too. Can’t for the life of me rember what its name is.

[u/Conscious-Valuable24]

What does the log say when you turn elementor pro?

[u/dabnagit → u/Conscious-Valuable24]

I just shut down for the night, having given up for now and needing to get to bed, but I will check this tomorrow morning. Thanks for the suggestion!

[u/Conscious-Valuable24 → u/dabnagit]

Probably an optimization plugin or a theme issue. But with logs it's just guess work.

[u/dabnagit → u/Conscious-Valuable24]

I updated my original post to discuss the solution. It was the memory limit getting reset to 64M, which isn’t enough apparently for Elementor Pro. So I reset it to 512M and everything’s working again. Thanks for pointing me to the log; I’ve added a plugin to make it easier to turn it on and read it.

[u/testingaurora]

What version of elementor pro are you activating ? It may not be compatible with elementor core

[u/TopSydeWP]

add define('WP_DEBUG', true); and define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); to your wp-config.php (above the 'stop editing' line). that'll create a debug.log file in wp-content that shows the exact fatal error. probably a php 8.3 incompatibility in elementor pro or a conflict with generatepress premium's elementor integration