This month, the Emberly team discovered that WordPress 6.2 has begun to cause issues with websites who have custom themes, typically built before 2020. For effected sites, the frontend continues to operate normally, but the backend of the site (the WordPress administrative dashboard) shows a 500 internal error.
We discussed this with the SiteGround team in connection with several sites hosted on SiteGround, as they have been experiencing this issue across a number of sites and have not yet discovered a fix. Currently, no sites on Emberly Hosting are effected.
Currently, we have rolled back these sites to WordPress 6.1.1 in order to allow them to continue to function, and disabled automatic core updates via the functions.php file and for SiteGround websites, within the SiteGround console. This has solved the issue for now, though we ask that our maintenance clients please not update WordPress Core to 6.2 (and in general, leave the updates to our team as part of our Website Maintenance package).
We will be revisiting a plan to resolve the issue and anticipate having a report back on this within the next month or two as we continue to work on our maintenance websites.
If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team!