The “Internal Service Error” message is not always caused by a technical issue on your server. If your website is built with WordPress, the error message can be caused by an unsuccessful plugin update. If this is the case, you can temporary disable the plugin causing the error and update it manually via the control panel instead of WordPress dashboard.

The problem is, you won’t be able to login to the WordPress dashboard to enable the plugin if you have the “Internal Service Error” message. The solution is, you can disable the plugin via the control panel of your web hosting server (such as cPanel, CWP, VestaCP, and so on). You can disable the plugin by renaming the plugin folder to a different name. For instance, if you want to disable the Elementor plugin, you can rename the “elementor” folder to “elementor-disable” or other name of your choice.

How to disable a WordPress plugin via control panel

As mentioned, you can disable the plugin via the control panel of your web hosting server by renaming its original folder. You can do this whether via terminal (if you have terminal access) or via file manager of your panel.

If you want to rename the folder via control panel file manager, login to your control panel and open its file manager feature.

Go to the root directory of your WordPress installation and enter to wp-content/plugins folder. Select the plugin you want to disable and rename it.

After doing this, WordPress will assume that the plugin you renamed its folder is no longer available so that it won’t read the scripts inside the folder. Try to relogin to your WordPress to check out if everything is back to normal. Once everything is back to normal, you can fix the plugin update problem.