Plugin Support
Milos
(@miloss84)
Hi there,
Thanks for contacting us and hope you are doing well and having a great day.
Please deactivate all your plugins (besides Elementor) to rule out the possibility of a plugin or theme conflict. I understand that you don’t want to do this on your live site, but this is the first step to identifying the potential issue.
Please if you cannot do this on the live site you can create a staging site and do this there – https://elementor.com/help/create-staging-site/
If it solves the issue reactivate them one by one to find the culprit. If it didn’t help, switch your theme (temporarily) to a default WP theme such as Twenty Nineteen and see if it makes any difference.
Also, the warning is harmless but noisy. You can try rolling back to a previous version of PHP and see if this helps.
I am looking forward to hearing back from you soon.
Kind regards,
Please just tell me what the nature of the particular file is and its importance. Also, what particular Elementor settings, if any, pertain to it. I need to make this stop and I don’t feel it’s fair that you’re not revealing anything about such a small file that should have a very clear purpose that you could relate to me in a couple sentences.
50,000 lines in the log in 7 days is not harmless.
Purely hypothetically, why would one think it’s correct to have a PHP file with an undefined array key when presumably array keys should be defined?
Plugin Support
Milos
(@miloss84)
Hi there,
Thank you for contacting me again.
The file in question, /modules/content-sanitizer/module.php, is part of Elementor’s internal content sanitization system. It filters or cleans up widget content before rendering or saving, mainly to ensure content security and integrity. It’s not tied to any user-configurable settings in Elementor’s UI — it’s a backend safeguard, particularly for dynamic content inserted via widgets.
The PHP warning you’re seeing: Warning: Undefined array key “widgetType” means that Elementor’s code is attempting to access an array key widgetType that hasn’t been set (or is missing) in some instances. Under PHP 8.2, this now throws a warning rather than silently returning null, which is why you’re seeing such a massive increase recently — likely exacerbated by the latest WordPress or Elementor update triggering more frequent sanitization.
So the short version is: this file is safe to keep as-is, but the warning is a result of missing input — not broken functionality.
So why doesn’t Elementor account for this? Normally, well-defended code uses isset() or ?? to guard against this. However, because Elementor operates in a performance-sensitive context, some non-critical guard clauses may have been missed or removed historically for speed — even if that’s questionable.
To resolve this, please try following the steps below: To rule out the possibility of a plugin or theme conflict, please deactivate all your plugins (besides Elementor ).
If this solves the issue, reactivate them one by one to find the culprit. If it doesn’t help, switch your theme (temporarily) to a default WP theme such as Twenty Nineteen and see if it makes any difference.
I am looking forward to hearing back from you soon.
Kind regards,
Plugin Support
Rica
(@ricav)
Due to inactivity, this ticket has been closed.
@bjf2000 Did you ever find the source of this error? A website I manage started throwing these warnings out in the log today right after the site experienced a 500 internal server error, in tandem with another warning:
Warning: foreach() argument must be of type array|object, string given in /home/websitename/wp-content/plugins/elementor/includes/db.php on line 268
@freshpromo No, but yours appears to be another kind of warning. As long as it doesn’t start doing it in heavy volume, it may just be a one-off or occasional thing.
