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5 Common WordPress Errors and How to Resolve Them

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WordPress has become one of the best CMS platforms for blog and web design. It offers automatic and smooth updates thus making it easy to manage. WordPress is also highly-customizable thus allowing you to add new plugins and themes to your website. However, the platform has its own share of common errors which you are likely to encounter but these can be resolved with ease. Here are some of the most common WordPress errors plus the appropriate solutions to use when you encounter them.

Error When Loading Your Website

Your website acts as a 24/7 shop and needs to load without any error. However, even well designed WordPress sites might fail to load, thus preventing visitors from accessing valuable information that you are providing. This might be caused by a number of factors including plugin incompatibility or conflicts between plugins. To resolve this, you might need to deactivate all the plugins and activate one by one to see which are the ones causing the error. Once you have identified the plugin at fault, you can then study the codes to understand the root cause of this issue. You can either debug the plugin yourself or approach the plugin’s developer to resolve this issue.

White Screen of Death

The website could also display white screen of death which makes it the worst problem to have as you have no idea what has went wrong. Most of the time, it is caused by scripts or PHP errors and thus affecting what is to be displayed on your web pages. You can either increase the PHP memory limit in WordPress or use a default theme to see if the white screen of death is gone. If not, you will require an experienced web developer to help trace the root cause of these problems and resolve them quickly before they cost your business dearly.

404 Error – Not Found

If you keep seeing this 404 error page when you navigate your website, you should fix it as soon as possible as you might be losing potential online leads and hurting your SEO score. The first thing you have to do is to go to Settings > Permalinks in your wp-admin and click on “Save Changes” again to reset the permalinks. In most cases, this should fix the issue. If not, you have to check if the affected pages have the correct permalink as you specified. Sometimes, it is a misspell on your end when you indicate the link. If not, you will have to seek professional help to fix this issue for you.

Error Establishing a Database Connection

This error message is obvious that your WordPress site is not able to connect to the database. Usually this happens when there is an error in the database credentials (database host, database username, and database password). You have to first check your wp-config file to check if you have entered the correct database credentials.

define('DB_NAME', 'database-name');
define('DB_USER', 'database-username');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'database-password');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

Make sure these above details tally with the database created in your cpanel account. If it is correct, then it is most probably your web hosting server issue.

Syntax Error in WordPress

This most probably occurs when you are modifying or adding a few lines of codes with incorrect syntax into your theme or plugin. This will result in a PHP parse error and you should see an error message somewhere in your website like:

Parse error – syntax error, unexpected $var-name in /public_html/site1/wp-content/themes/my-theme/functions.php on line 225

This error message will indicate the unexpected code with the location of the script where the error occurs and the specified line number. This is pretty straightforward and all you need to do is to locate this file and fix the affected codes. Most of the time, it is a missing bracket or misspelling in your codes.

We hope this helps to solve your WordPress errors. If you face an error that is not listed here, do let us know and we can assist to look into it and provide a fix for you.

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