UpdraftPlus’s admin page is highly interactive. This interactivity is achieved in the usual way – using the JavaScript programming language, and the jQuery JavaScript library. You normally don’t need to know anything about what that means to fix your problem – read on.
Sometimes, other plugins or your WordPress theme may have JavaScript and/or jQuery errors which cause the UpdraftPlus settings or restore pages to fail to display properly. This causes seeing the message “If you can read this after the page finishes loading, then there is a JavaScript or jQuery problem in your web browser.” (The other main cause is that you have turned JavaScript off in your web browser- we presume you’d know if you’d done this).
When this happens, it is always the fault of the other plugin/theme – because they should not be loading JavaScript at all on UpdraftPlus’s settings page. The fact that their JavaScript is causing a conflict just makes it worse; but, they should be loading it only on their own settings page. If this happens to you, then to find out the culprit, do this:
- Reload the UpdraftPlus page and wait for it to finish loading – just to make sure that you really do have this problem. (The message sending you to this page does not disappear until the page finishes loading – so, if for some reason a temporary network problem causes the page to not finish loading then you may need nothing more than to reload the page).
- Disable all your plugins except for UpdraftPlus.
- Switch your theme back to the WordPress default theme (Twenty Twelve, or Twenty Thirteen, etc., depending on your version of WordPress).
- Now reload the UpdraftPlus page. Does it show correctly? If not, then please report it to us – see here.
- If it does now show correctly, then it is one of your plugins or your theme which is breaking it. Re-enable them, one-by-one, and reload the UpdraftPlus page each time. The one that causes it to break upon being re-enabled is the culprit – report the bug to its makers (or replace it with an alternative). If you’ve got a huge number of plugins then you could take a more mathematical approach and re-enable/disable half of the potential culprits at a time in order to narrow down the offender more quickly. The best bet is often to use your intuition as to which of your plugins is slightly dodgy/low quality.
If that didn’t make a difference (it’s not guaranteed too – plugins and themes are not the only way to modify WordPress’s behaviour), then here are three more things to try:
- View the source of the UpdraftPlus settings page in your web browser – i.e. use the “View Source” feature in your web browser. Scroll to the bottom of the source – is any error message displaying there? If not, then edit your wp-config.php file and turn WP_DEBUG to true. Reload the UpdraftPlus settings page… does an error show now?
- If you open your web developer console (usually this is via Control-Shift-J or F12), then a helpful message might be there (or at least some message that will confirm the existence of problem).
- Finally: if your hosting company is Network Solutions, then you may have this problem instead: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/after-install-get-500-error-when-select-settings-interesting-fix?replies=7