Critical: High CPU Usage & Server Crash Loop (Confirmed Woodmart Related)

Hello,

Thanks for the detailed report and for narrowing it down to the theme. We’ll be glad to investigate with temporary WP-Admin and FTP access.

Before we log in, please help us capture exactly what’s happening.

What we need from you
1) A short screen video showing the issue
– Open an SSH session to your server.
– Run: top -c -d 1
This shows real-time CPU usage per process; keep it visible on screen.
– In a browser, open wp-admin > Appearance > Themes.
– First, activate a default theme (e.g., Twenty Twenty-Four) and browse your Shop page and any page where you saw the Widgets error. Keep top running for 1–2 minutes.
– Then activate WoodMart and repeat the same actions on the same pages. Let top run for another 1–2 minutes.
– If you can, also open the page with the attribute filter widget that you suspect and record the CPU behavior while applying a couple of filter changes.
– Please upload the video or provide a link.

2) Temporary access
– Send temporary WP-Admin and FTP/SFTP credentials in a private reply so we can check theme settings, widgets, and server behavior directly.

Immediate checks to perform on your side
– Widgets screen error: install and activate the “Classic Widgets” plugin to switch the Widgets screen to the legacy interface (this resolves known errors with the block-based Widgets UI).
– Temporarily remove filter widgets:
Appearance > Widgets > Shop sidebar
Remove WOODMART WooCommerce Layered Nav and WOODMART Price Filter widgets (and any other product filter widgets). Check CPU behavior again with WoodMart active.

We have seen high CPU attributed to the theme actually caused by automated traffic.
– If you use Cloudflare, temporarily block all countries for a few minutes and watch top. If CPU immediately normalizes, set firewall rules to block the abusive sources by country or ASN. Let us know your findings.

What we will do once we have access
– Reproduce the CPU spike on the same pages you tested and monitor resource usage.
– Inspect your Shop archive, filters, and Widgets setup.

We’re standing by for the video and credentials and can proceed right away.

Kind Regards

Hello,

The login information you provided is not valid. Also, it is not enough to do all the tests. Please provide all the requested information so our specialists can do the check properly.

Thank you in advance.

Thanks for the update. Your test points us to the filter widgets setup as the trigger: dozens of Layered Nav widgets can generate a lot of WooCommerce filter queries at once, and on shared hosting this may quickly hit resource limits.

Please do these focused checks:

– Activate Storefront.
– Add the same number of WooCommerce Layered Nav widgets with the same category logic you use now.
– Browse the same shop/category pages and watch CPU. If the spike reproduces, it confirms this load comes from WooCommerce’s filtering itself (not the theme). If it doesn’t, we’ll investigate on our side.

Also, rebuild WooCommerce attribute indexing via WooCommerce > Status > Tools > Regenerate the product attributes lookup table.

If, after the control test the spike happens only with WoodMart active (and not with the default theme using the same number of widgets), please send working FTP/SFTP access. We will check your current widgets, archive layout, and filters in place.

Note from our side: loading 40–100 separate attribute filter widgets can be heavy for a shared hosting environment. The control test will show whether the server can handle that many widgets with the default theme.