WordPress Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON Error

While helping a new customer out with their WordPress website we were getting the error “Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON“. We haven’t seen this error before, but it a very common one. The error would happen when we would try to make even just a small text change. We couldn’t do anything till this was fixed.

There were a ton of solutions out there on the web, but this just wasn’t fixing our issue. The customer was using Godaddy’s Ultimate Managed WordPress hosting. We tried flushing the cache, but this didn’t help. We tried changing the permalinks, but the error Updating failed. The response is not a valid JSON prevent us from changing the permalinks.

We tried all the fixes suggested and nothing worked. We finally called Godaddy tech support and they were blaming the cache. We cleared all the cache and waited till the next day to give the hosting time to clear out. The next day we came back and the permalinks had changed away from “custom”. Now we could make the changes and the site was running better.

Godaddy didn’t say they flushed the cache, but something changed. Maybe we just needed to wait till the Content Distribution Network (CDN) cache was cleared.

Let us know if this helped you…