Common WordPress Issues and How to Fix Them

For many developers, WordPress is a go-to solution for both large and small jobs, however as with most things in life, it's far from a perfect solution. Despite being a leading platform on the web, WordPress' versatility makes it difficult to pinpoint the sources of failure when something breaks. While it's impossible to explain every WordPress issue within this article, the guide below should help you navigate a few of the most common mistakes.

The White Screen of Death

For the few readers who are fortunate enough to have never encountered the white screen of death, this error consists of a blank screen loading when you try to access the site in question.

The two major causes of this error are compatibility issues from plugins and themes. If you can access your administration panel, the best way to pinpoint this error is to try deactivating all your plugins one by one, and if that doesn't work, then try changing your theme to the default WordPress design.

The First Steps

If you can't access your administration panel, you'll have to manually deactivate the plugins and themes over FTP. After logging into your server, navigate to the plugins directory (usually wp-content/plugins) or the themes directory (wp-content/themes) and append '_old' to the end of the name.

From there try accessing your admin panel. If you get in, you can try reactivating your plugins or themes individually until you recreate the issue. Once that happens, you'll know the primary source of your issues.

Advanced Troubleshooting

For more advanced troubleshooting, you can also go into your wp-config file and set the WP_DEBUG value to true (as shown below):

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );

After doing this, navigate to the page with the error and you should see the details of what is causing your errors. Once you are done, be sure to disable this feature by setting the value to false (as shown below):

define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

Maintenance Mode after an Upgrade

Continue reading %Common WordPress Issues and How to Fix Them%

by Charles Costa via SitePoint