Solve ‘Fatal Error’ WordPress message

A client using Uber Global hosting here in Australia needed some help. Upon copying a website to Uber hosting using BackupBuddy they got a white screen. After renaming the plugins (to deactivate the plugins as the WordPress dashboard was inaccessible) and then trying to activate the plugins again, the ‘Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted …’ message appeared. As the website is using a good quality theme and plugins, this error indicates insufficient memory available on the host for the website scripts.

Ask your host to increase the available memory limit

My client contacted Uber support and they increased the available memory to 256MB. I tested with phpinfo.php and the memory_limit parameter was set at 256M. Unfortunately the ‘Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted …’ error was still evident when trying to activate plugins.

Try to increase WordPress memory via wp-config

The next attempt at increasing the memory available for WordPress scripts was to increase memory in the wp-config.php file via adding define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' ); before the wp-settings.php inclusion.

And still the ‘Fatal error’ message appeared.

How to increase WordPress memory using PHP.ini

Next step, and the one that resolved the memory issues, was to add a php.ini file to the wp-admin directory on the server. Here are instructions to increasing the memory that proved to work on Uber Global hosting (and usually works on Crazydomains hosting too):

1. Using a text editor, create a file called php.ini
2. Save the following to the php.ini file:

   memory_limit = 256M

3. Using FTP (or the File Manager in cPanel), copy the newly created php.ini to the wp-admin folder on your host server.

The WordPress memory issues should now be resolved.