When it comes to website designing & development, maximum users often prefer easy to navigate CMS. WordPress is the best example of such CMS. This user-friendly platform comes with the utmost flexibility in all aspects and very easy to manage. Its exciting features like embedded blogging, agility, responsiveness, etc., make it the most popular among all Content management systems.
Perfections require dedication; that’s what the WordPress platform requires. It also requires detailed consistency aligned with its endless featuring approaches; even the minor omissions can lead to the major issues obstructing the working of the website. The WordPress problems you may encounter are associated with its technical aspects.
7 Common WordPress Errors
Here we have discussed few common WordPress problems with suitable solutions. Before making any change, your advised to take the backup of your WordPress website. In case if something goes wrong, then you will be able to at least revert back to the previous state by the “Restore” option. You can perform backup either manually by backup option or by installing any other backup plugin.
1. 404-page error
You may have often come across an error displayed as the “404 Page not found”. The 404 error may occur in numerous situations. The most common among all can be trying to access a page that is not fetchable by the WordPress server for few reasons, like either the page URL you are trying to access has been changed, or its location is undefined.
Solution
In some situations, the 404 error occurs if the URL of a particular page is inaccessible. Its cause may be that the last time you changed the location of your page but forgot to update its URL. To resolve this issue, you need to implement redirects. Follow the steps mentioned below to implement redirects.
- Go to your WordPress admin panel.
- Select the “Tools” option from the side menu.
- Choose the “redirection” option from the submenu of Tools.
- Here you would see two insertable tabs such as “source URL” & “target URL.” Enter the old URL of that page you tried to access in the “source URL” tab.
- Insert the updated URL of the page concerning its new location in the “Target URL” tab.
- Click on the “Add redirect” button, and now you’d be able to access that page quite easily.
2. Database connection error
The database is considered the core of any website. Your whole website gets down if you encounter an error in establishing a connection with your WordPress database. The few common reasons for this issue may be either invalid login credentials you used to access your database or any corrupted file located in DB.
Solution
The server database server may also go down to cause this issue, or the whole dB may get corrupted. Follow the stated steps to get out of this problem.
- Navigate your WordPress admin panel.
- Select the database option from the side menu of the admin panel.
- Here you will see both options to repair & optimize the database as “Optimize DB” & “repair DB.”
- Optimize DB improves the performance of WordPress websites mainly.
- Select the repair option to fix DB connection issues.
3. Changes not working
Sometimes when you apply any changes to your WordPress website, but it does not show on access. Each time you access that relevant content or page, you see the previous version of it. The reasons are that most of the time database access the files from Cache storage. As you are already familiar with cache, the most recent files your access gets saved in the cache folder to improve the file accessing mechanism.
Solution
To clear or delete the cache stored in your WordPress database, you can install any efficient plugin such as leverage browsing cache or WP engine.
4. Invalid WordPress credential
You may also encounter a common problem in logging in to your WP admin panel because of invalid credentials (wrong email address or password). This mainly happens with the people who preferred to proceed with the default suggested password of high strength.
Solution
It is suggested to set an easy to remember password initially to avoid any login issue. In a state, if you have forgotten your password, you can click on the “Lost your password?” option available in the WordPress login interface. This proceeds you to recover your password quite feasibly.
Sometimes any minor issue may also occur in email, so enter the precise email address.
5. Memory exhausted error
The problem is self-explanatory. When the files exceed the allocated memory limit, it gets exhausted and shows an error. This might be because either you have installed many plugins, or in some situations, the exceeded code limit can also cause this.
Installing too many plugins also increases the overall size of your website visibly. Installing too many plugins also impacts the performance of your WP site as it slows down the speed of your website, and it takes more time than usual to load properly.
Solution
The quickest solution to resolve this problem is to free up the memory space by deleting unnecessary files. Limit the code of your website to the allocated memory if possible and deactivate all the plugins also.
6. 500 internal server error
As the name implies, the issues are with the server. It depicts that the codded PHP files in the server have either exceeded the specified memory limit, or the issue has occurred with the .htaccess file located in your WP database.
Solutions
The solution varies with the cause of the problem. Suppose the problem is with the PHP files in memory you need to filter out the PHP code or delete the unnecessary pieces of code to free some space in server memory.
If the problem lies in the .htaccess file, then you may need to delete specific plugins. Because few corrupted plugins or any corrupted file in the current theme generally causes this issue. The best practice to resolve this issue is to change your WordPress theme & delete all the extra plugins.
7. Connection timed out
Connection timed out is a very common error in WordPress somehow linked with memory exhausted also. As we have described earlier, that an oversized website takes a long time to load accurately. In some situations, it may also restrict the website from loading and displays an error message “connection timed out” on screens.
A short or limited connection time limit set by default can also cause this issue.
Solution
The possible solution to this issue is also partially similar to the one we have stated for memory exhausted error. You just need to free the memory by deleting unnecessary files & plugins.
The other solution is to increase the connection time limit manually, which is 30 seconds by default.
- To increase this, you need to access your PHP file “wp-config.”
- Set the time limit to 200 or 300 by altering set_time_limit (200);
Note: you can change figure 200 concerning your requirement.
Conclusion
We have covered the most common problems you may encounter if you are a WordPress user. All the mentioned solutions to the WordPress errors are safe to implement. But it is suggested to take the backup of your entire website to avoid the risk of data loss.
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