ZeroFatal – PHP Fatal Error Monitor & Crash Detection

Description

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.

Technical details