Update.
I’ve spent all day on this and chased down every article I can find and tried everything with no joy.
I can log in and use the satellite site ok (though it tends to ask for the password a lot more regularly than it ever did before)
When I try to log into the Network admin site the login screen just flickers and stays (I tried putting the wrong password in and it says the wrong password) so It’s like its saying the password is fine but there is nowhere to go.
Some of the things I have tried:
I’ve disabled the theme on the satellite web site – no difference – put child theme back.
Looked through the HTaccass files to see if they are looking ok
Looked through the Wpconfig.php for the same
Turned on debug (I get one error from functions.php that always ben there and is to do with an inline style but I have no idea how to start to fix it – as it was happening before today I haven’t spent time looking further into it)
I’ve checked major things in the DB like site URLs etc
I’ve cleared all the serverside and browser caches I can get to – repeatably.
I can’t get to any of the plugins as they are all network enabled from the network admin site.
I can I guess perform a complete restore from a back up, but I have done some content work since then (a pain but not insurmountable) but I really would like to understand what I did/went wrong as the plugin (up until this point) was really helping with page speed loading.
If anyone has anything to suggest would really appreciate it.
Thanks
I would like to say I have fixed it – well it is working, though I am not 100% sure why.
I made sure every single piece of caching everywhere was disabled including CDN
I went back into chrome developer and flushed the cookies, left the page in dev mode to force a cookie error from the log in screen. Left developer mode and logged in, and it worked, all be it very slowly.
I’m hosted on Siteground and since getting back into the main admin site I can see that some of the server side settings are set as expected which they were not yesterday.
This also caused me to remember before installing Asset Cleanup plugin I had been fiddling with defer render blocking JS setting in the SG optimizer plug in. This included the before and after images plugin that originally was causing me my issue.
I don’t know if this may have contributed to anything.
Hope this might help someone else – especially if on siteground.
@clive001 thanks for the update and I’m glad you’ve fixed this! You said that you reset Asset CleanUp settings and you still weren’t able to log in. This shouldn’t happen, especially if it’s a backend issue. I guess you tried with Asset CleanUp deactivated and still didn’t work.
SG Optimizer has deferred JS and other features that could conflict with Asset CleanUp if the features are used together. A golden rule is to avoid enabling the same features in any performance plugins as they often lead to more resources used and they rarely bring any benefits. For instance, minifying CSS in both SG Optimizer and Asset CleanUp is pointless as it’s just enough to enable it on one of the plugins.
What I usually recommend is leaving the front-end optimization to Asset CleanUp, and everything else (e.g. things related to the page caching) to SG Optimizer. Front-end optimization always works best if it’s all used from the same plugin. For instance, minify JS and combining the files is meant to work flawlessly with Asset CleanUp as it’s been tested extensively. If you enable minify JS in one plugin and them combine JS with Asset CleanUp, not only it’s harder to manage settings, since they are not all in one place, but it can lead to incompatibilities and sometimes duplicated JS which is worse than it was before.
Hi Gabe,
Yes (to be clear) I have a multisite network with only one website on it (at the moment) I reset Asset Clean up, on the one website; However, I could not get back into the main network profile to deactivate it, or any of the plugins because of the error. Being multisite with all the plugins controlled from the main site presented a bit of a problem, as I could only deactivate them from where I could not get to.
Thanks for the clarification on the duplication. I came to a similar conclusion during the large amount of reading I did today ;). The trouble is when you start these little adventures (my first forray into speed tweaking) not knowing much, you build your knowledge as you go, and it leaves a trail that catches you out as you meander from trial to trial to tweek out an extra 0.5ms and get Lighthouse into the green!
I will remove all duplications from siteground and try again with the plugin tomorrow, its been a long day!
I would like to say that I am extremely happy that my issues were totally down to my learning on the job and employing “hope and poke” technology. Up until the point where it all went bang, I have to say the plugin did (and does) impress me. I spent ages trying to understand what the reports were telling me was wrong, then loads more time trying to work out how to fix the bloat in the things like Divi (which I also love) and your plugin was the first thing that I could use, had the most useful and informative help text of any product I’ve seen in a long time and that I could actually understand. Finally, and perhaps most importantly when I changed things it made a positive difference to the speed tests. I will certainly be attacking it all again tomorrow, though with probably a bit more caution.
Many thanks for taking the time to clarify things for me, it really helps when you’re never quite sure of what your doing ;o)!
