As a PSA, community members should know that Oxygen Builder version 3.9 (and any previous versions) will likely be broken on Bluehost WordPress hosting as of mid March, 2022. This will probably be occurring with many other hosting companies in the near future too.

The problem will manifest as an endless loading animation for the builder, when in reality, nothing will ever load.

As of mid March, 2022, Bluehost is automatically upgrading PHP versions from 7 to 8.

Upgrading PHP is good, but Oxygen Builder 3.9 does not work with version 8.0. It simply will not work.

Luckily, there are 2 easy fixes.

Fix 1 - Downgrade Bluehost PHP

The best fix here is to simply downgrade the PHP in Bluehost. From the messaging on their site, they make it sound like you can't do this, but luckily there's an easy way.

In the Bluehost dashboard, head over to the advanced tab. Scroll down to the "Software" section, and click on MultiPHP Manager. This is a Cpanel utility that helps you manage the PHP versions for individual websites.

Once in the panel, you'll be greeted with some info. (1) - This shows the lowest PHP version on your domains. Soon it will state 8.0 or 8.1 as Bluehost rolls out version 8.X for all WordPress websites.

To downgrade, find your site and (2) check it offer. You'll notice that the dev.isotropic.co domain has a PHP version 8.0.

Select the PHP version to downgrade to (3). You'll want to choose 7.4.

Finally, hit "apply", and you're Oxygen Builder loading issue will be fixed.

This is the same process that you follow when upgrading Bluehost PHP versions as well.

Fix 2 - Update Oxygen

Oxygen Builder 4.0 is compatible with PHP 8.0 (we tested). You may want to wait to get started until that version comes out in the next few weeks.

There's currently a beta version which we took a look at here.

Note that Beta versions should not be used on production websites.

While We're Here (The real fix)

This is something I mention a lot in the Facebook group, but if you're paying $3/mo for shared hosting and expect a lighting-fast backend and frontend loading experience, you're in for a rude awakening.

You need to ditch Bluehost if you want to keep your sanity. Here's what comes with cheap shared hosting:

• Much slower backend loading times for Oxygen Builder
• Inefficiency when building and editing your site, a slow WP-admin
• Resource scarcity, resulting in downtime and slow loading website frontends (TTFB)
• Crashes and white screens of death when doing things that demand server resources, like WooCommere

Our suggestion is always to look into Cloudways hosting, which offers dedicated servers from Vultur, Digital Ocean and others starting at $10/mo. It's pretty easy to use, has great support, and is miles better than any shared host like Bluehost or Godaddy.

We host almost all client sites with them, unless they're really high traffic (Rocket.net hosts this WordPress content site), or major WooCommerce sites (in that case we use ServeBolt).

Besides professional advice, I've also done a lot of quantitative testing that proves this point further.

• Better Bluehost Alternatives (2022)

This shows how even a cheap Digital Ocean server will massively outperform shared hosting like Bluehost.

If you want to try out Digital Ocean for yourself, using this link will give you $100 in credits to mess with. You can follow this tutorial (video) to install an easy server panel on a $5/mo droplet which includes OpenLitespeed and makes it easy to host your own WordPress sites.

• Oxygen Builder Backend Loading Time Test

This shows how the hardware behind the Oxygen installation matters.

And finally, some further reading on Oxygen Builder hosting: