Content Issue, CS not loading at all and gray screen

Support
#1

Hello Themeco Support,

We recently experienced a major issue where all content inside Cornerstone was completely removed in the middle of the night, and all pages were gone. We had to restore an older backup of the website in order to get the site working again and recover all of the content.

Since restoring the backup, Cornerstone is no longer functioning properly. Whenever we try to open Cornerstone, we only get a gray screen and the builder does not load.

To troubleshoot the issue, I have already tried the following:

  • Disabled and reactivated the child theme
  • Disabled and reactivated all plugins
  • Manually updated both the theme and the Cornerstone plugin
  • Checked the allocated PHP memory limit (512M)

Unfortunately, none of these steps resolved the problem, and Cornerstone still only shows a gray screen when opening with nothing accesible.

Could you please help us identify the cause of this issue and advise on the next steps?

Thank you in advance.

#2

Hello @Creative_Edge_Media,

Thanks for writing to us.

Thank you for checking the plugin conflicts to help you with your concerns. Please copy your live website to a staging server and share the staging admin credentials so we can debug safely without affecting your live site. Please share your details in a secure note. Please provide the following details

  • WordPress Login URL
  • Admin-level username and password
  • Exact page URL

You can find the Secure Note button at the bottom of your posts

secure-note
secure-note1040×250 15.3 KB

Thanks

#3

@prakash_s Thank you, will be working on it today and send you the info in the secure note when ready!

#4

@prakash_s The secure note was created under the original post. Please let me know if you need anything else and keep us updated about the issue.

#5

Hey Geoff,

First, I’d like to give you an idea what Cornerstone does on load:

When you open /cornerstone, the server prepares a giant package of data (all your settings, elements, colors, fonts, etc.), shrink-wraps it (gzip compression), and sends it inside the HTML page to the browser. The browser then unwraps it and uses it to build the editor.

What’s going wrong:

The package is arriving at your browser torn open halfway through like a package that got ripped in transit. The browser tries to unwrap it, but since it’s incomplete, it can’t. That’s the Unexpected end of JSON input error I see in the console. With no data to work with, the editor has nothing to show gray screen.

Why is it getting torn? The three most likely culprits:

  1. Your server has a “pipe that’s too narrow” Web servers have limits on how much data they’ll pass through at once. If the compressed package is bigger than that limit, the server silently cuts it off. This is the most common cause on live sites.

  2. A cached broken copy A caching plugin (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, etc.) or your CDN (Cloudflare, etc.) saved a previously broken/incomplete version of the page and keeps serving that bad copy to everyone, even after you fix things.

  3. PHP ran out of memory mid-way PHP hit its memory limit while building that data package, crashed silently, and sent whatever it had managed to prepare which was incomplete.

Quickest way to test which one it is:

Add this line to your wp-config.php:


define('CS_DISABLE_GZIP', true);

This tells Cornerstone to skip the compression entirely and send the data as plain text. If Cornerstone loads after that, the pipe/buffer size (#1) is almost certainly your culprit. If it still doesn’t load, lean toward a cache issue (#2) clear everything and try again.

Let us know how it goes or if you need the technical details.

Thanks.

#6

Hi @christian, thank you so much, this fixed the issue and CS is now working properly!!!

#7

You are most welcome, Geoff.
Good to know that @Christian was able to help you out.

#8

Hi there.

We managed to open Cornerstone, but now, it’s not saving any of the changes. We can modify and update the pages, and save them… but as soon as we refresh it, the changes are gone. The only solution for this is to duplicate the page, then editing is saved. Any workaround so we don’t have to duplicate a page just to edit it? Thank you

#9

Hello Geoff,

Which have you edited that were not saved? I edited the Music and the changes was saved by the way. See that I was able to add a Section and it was saved.

  • See the secure note below.

Thanks.

#10

Hi @ruenel, looks like it works for the staging website since we duplicated it after having the issue with CS. But the original website still showing saving issue on all of the pages unless duplicated.

#11

Hey Geoff,

In your live site, please contact your web host and increase the value the server’s MySQL max_allowed_packet to the maximum (16M or greater).

Also, if your live site uses caching, please clear all caches and disable caching temporarily including server caching (this needs your web host’s help).

Let us know if that helps.

#12

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