W3 Total Cache was fine – and now it randomly crashed my site

I have had it running for about a year. I actually paid for premium support in Sep 2020 to help me make sure it was setup correctly. I am also using StackPath CDN.

Suddenly, I received an automatic email from wordpress:

Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue
In this case, WordPress caught an error with one of your plugins, W3 Total Cache.
When seeking help with this issue, you may be asked for some of the following information:
WordPress version 5.5.3
Current theme: Salient (version 7.6)
Current plugin: W3 Total Cache (version 2.1.0)
PHP version 7.4.11

My site was dead. And I could not even login to wordpress admin side.

I eventually got in to the back side with the help of InMotion support. I tried to roll back my PHP to version 7.2 but that didn’t help. I now also received a few errors about a create_function in my THEME being deprecated (which I never received before).

InMotion tech support helped me deactivate things slowly and we narrowed it down to w3 total cache. As soon as we deactivated W3, and cleared my browser cache, my site loaded again.

Now I am torn about how to handle next steps. If I re-activate it I loose access to the site. But since I paid for it I want to use it.

How do I proceed ?
And why did this happen OUT OF THE BLUE ?