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This problem started when I wanted to create a new post. I'm using the Elementor editor, so I created a new post, set the title and featured image and then clicked on "Edit with Elementor" as usual. While Elementor was loading, I got this error.

My first thought was that this is an Elementor issue. But then I tried to first create a new post and then save it as a draft or publish it first before editing it with Elementor, and to my surprise, nothing happened. No matter what I do, I always end up with an "auto-draft" with no content which I can't change for the life of me. Can't change the name, slug, or to be precise, I can't save any changes.

The funny thing is that this happens only for posts but not for pages. I can create new pages and edit old pages and posts without problems.

Tried deactivating plugins I installed since publishing my last post, clearing the cache, using a different browser, updating everything, but nothing worked. I'm not currently using a caching plugin and I see no errors in devtools.

Any idea what could be wrong? I saw this question where they were doing something with the REST API, but I have no idea what that is, so I can't tell if I can help myself with it.

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    You can try the troubleshooting steps I suggested (e.g. deactivate plugins and switch to a default theme) in my comments on the linked question and see if the issue persists.
    – Sally CJ
    Apr 1, 2021 at 13:42
  • I tried deactivating all plugins and switching to the twenty-twenty-one theme, but the issue persists. I've been thinking, the last thing I was doing was dequeuing some css files manually and replacing them with my own to optimize the website, but I tried reversing that and it didn't help either.
    – R2vale
    Apr 6, 2021 at 12:46
  • Then maybe you should hire someone to check the issue for you.. but some other things you can try, in no specific order: 1) Clear your site and browser caches. 2) Reinstall WordPress (core files). 3) Run a security scan on your site. 4) Check the .htaccess file for anything suspicious.
    – Sally CJ
    Apr 8, 2021 at 3:49
  • Thanks @SallyCJ. I tried clearing caches and I checked htaccess file, all seems fine. When running a few different security scans, the only error I get is "could not find the wp-content directory". However the wp-content directory is where it has always been. Could this be a permissions thing?
    – R2vale
    Apr 9, 2021 at 7:28

1 Answer 1

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Finally found a solution to my problem.

In my case I had set a 301 redirect for my front page (that is for "domain.com") to another page I wanted to use as the front page. Apparently that caused a problem when Elementor tried accessing it's content (although I'm not sure why it needs the content of my front page if I'm creating a new post).

So I removed the 301 redirect and just changed which page is set as the front page in Wordpress.

To clearify: I was avoiding the front page setting because I was afraid what was going to happen to all my backlinks pointing to the page I was redirecting to. But when you change your front page in Wordpress, the page's URL becomes "domain.com" and it's previous url "domain.com/page" is automatically 301 redirected to "domain.com". Which means that all links are kept unharmed.

Edit: I finally got rid of the problem. As it turns out, my redirect was only a part of the problem concerning only Elementor. But the ability to save/publish posts in Wordpress turned out to be an internal Wordpress error. After a few weeks of dealing with this issue I finally got an error when clicking on 'Publish' inside Wordpress, saying: "The response is not a valid JSON response".

After browsing around a while I found out that I was far from being alone in this issue. It turns out it is connected to permalinks, I found that this article explains it best.

I was able to fix the issue by either changing the permalink structure to 'plain' or by installing the Classic Editor plugin. Since plain permalinks are not acceptable for me, I chose the second. I'm sure this could also be resolved in a more elegant way, but I'm not proficient enough with backend development to do it. Hopefully this will be resolved with future Wordpress updates.

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  • I'm glad you found the solution, but how did you set the 301 redirect? Perhaps adding the details would be helpful to others who might be having the same or a similar problem.
    – Sally CJ
    Apr 9, 2021 at 12:59
  • Actually, I spoke to soon. Removing the 301 redirect did help me to access a new post with the Elementor editor, which I san use normally now. But if I want to publish any changes in Wordpress directly (like set a featured image), no changes are saved. My redirect looked like this: RewriteRule ^/?$ https://domain.com/page/ [R=301,L]
    – R2vale
    Apr 9, 2021 at 18:57

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