Directory / plugin

ZeroFatal – PHP Fatal Error Monitor & Crash Detection

v1.0.0 · by Sajeeb

Catches PHP fatal errors on your site, tells you exactly which plugin or theme caused them, and emails you immediately.

About this plugin

Your uptime monitor tells you when the whole site is down. It says nothing when a plugin conflict breaks only your checkout page, your contact form, or your admin dashboard — while the homepage still returns a cheerful 200 OK. Most site owners find out about those failures when a customer complains.

ZeroFatal watches for the failures a status check misses. When PHP hits a fatal error, ZeroFatal records what happened, works out which plugin or theme is responsible, and emails you before anyone else notices.

What it does

  • Catches PHP fatal errors and uncaught exceptions, including the ones that cause the white screen of death and the “There has been a critical error on this website” message.
  • Names the culprit. Instead of a raw file path, you see WooCommerce or Twenty Twenty-Four. Tracking down a plugin conflict starts with knowing which plugin.
  • Tells you how to fix it. Every error gets a plain-English explanation of what went wrong, the most likely cause, and a list of steps ordered from safest to most invasive. No PHP knowledge assumed.
  • Groups repeated errors. The same crash firing two hundred times is one row with a counter, not two hundred rows.
  • Emails you calmly. Errors arriving close together are grouped into one message rather than several, and a repeated error is only mentioned once per window. Choose immediate, grouped or a once-a-day summary.
  • Shows a readable stack trace, one frame per line, with WordPress core frames dimmed and the likely cause highlighted.
  • Keeps its own error log inside your dashboard, with filters for fatal, minor, resolved and ignored errors.
  • Cleans up after itself on a daily schedule you control.

Built to stay out of the way

  • No external requests. Ever. ZeroFatal never contacts any server. Your error data stays in your database and nowhere else. There is no telemetry, no phone-home, no account to create.
  • No measurable slowdown. On a normal page load the shutdown handler checks one value and stops. Nothing is written to the database unless an error actually happens.
  • It will not break your site. The capture code runs while your site may already be failing, so it guards every operation and fails silently rather than adding a second error on top of the first.
  • It does not fight WordPress. WordPress has its own fatal error handler and recovery mode. ZeroFatal observes and records; it never replaces or interferes with them.

Who it is for

Freelancers and agencies looking after client sites, and anyone who would rather hear about a site crash from their inbox than from a customer.

Plugin tags