Table of Contents
handling a wordpress site sounds fun until one day things just stop working out of nowhere like one moment your site is fine and next moment you open it and it’s either broken or showing some weird error and yeah it’s normal it happens even to old wordpress users but the good part is that most of these admin errors can be fixed easily if you just know what’s going on and don’t panic let’s talk about the most common ones and how you can fix them without doing anything super technical
white screen with nothing on it
this one’s scary cause you see nothing at all just a blank screen no error no text just white this usually means something crashed maybe a plugin or theme caused a serious issue and the site couldn’t load properly what helps here is trying to disable all plugins or change the theme from the backend or your hosting file area and if the site comes back then you’ll know where the problem was then turn them back on one by one to find the one that broke it
that critical error message
when you see something like “there has been a critical error on your website” it sounds serious but again it’s mostly a plugin or theme gone bad and yeah it can be fixed like before try stopping your plugins and switch your theme and also check if your hosting is using the right version of php sometimes just that update fixes the whole thing without doing anything else
Login is not working at all
sometimes you try to log in to your wp-admin and either the password doesn’t work or the page just keeps refreshing over and over it’s annoying and feels like you’re locked out if you forgot your password you can use the forgot password option but if even that doesn’t work you’ll need to reset it from your hosting area or database and if the login page is looping clear your browser cookies or try using a different browser it usually works
pages or posts showing 404
when homepage works but blog posts or pages show not found error it’s mostly a permalink setting problem just go to the permalink settings in your dashboard and save it again you don’t need to change anything just click save and it resets the structure and usually brings all the pages back to normal
internal server error
this one is really frustrating cause it doesn’t say much just a general error and it can be from anything like a plugin a theme a bad file or even low memory the common way to fix it is start removing plugins or themes one by one or ask your hosting if they can check what’s using too much memory or causing the error they usually help fast
can’t connect to database
this one comes with a message that says something like wordpress can’t connect to your database and that usually means something’s wrong with the database info used by the site either the name or username or password is off or maybe the database is down totally it’s good to check those details inside your hosting and fix them if anything’s changed
stuck in maintenance mode
this happens when your site gets stuck after you were updating a plugin or theme and now it just says the site is in maintenance mode and doesn’t go away it looks like it’s updating forever but it’s not really stuck all you have to do is remove a small file from the main folder that tells wordpress it’s updating and then your site comes back to normal just like that
can’t upload images
when you try to upload a photo or file and it gives an http error or says upload failed it’s probably a problem with how much memory your site has or maybe the folder where uploads go doesn’t have the right permission you can ask your hosting support to check that for you or sometimes the issue fixes itself after you wait a bit or try uploading a smaller size image
layout broke after update
sometimes you update a plugin or theme and suddenly your site looks weird the layout is messed up or some buttons stopped working this happens when the new update doesn’t work well with other parts of your site it’s best to clear your cache both in the browser and in the site if you’re using any cache plugins and if it still looks broken you can try rolling back to the previous version of that plugin or theme till they fix it
too many redirects error
this one usually comes up when the site keeps redirecting and doesn’t stop like a loop it happens when something’s wrong with the site url settings or if you just moved from http to https and didn’t fix all the links you need to make sure both the site address and home address are exactly the same and either both with www or both without it using a simple plugin that handles https setup also helps a lot
most of these admin errors are not as big as they look and you don’t always need a developer to fix them just taking a breath and checking one thing at a time helps a lot and always make sure to take a backup of your site regularly so even if something goes really wrong you can bring it back easily
