16 years have passed since the inception of WordPress. Since then, the CMS provider has assisted a large mass of people around the world for opening its own website, blogs,  online stores, and portals to strengthen business and marketing. That is sound proof for the platform’s agility and strength, and the perfection it offers in their service.

Still, WordPress encounters a bunch of recurring problems that its users may find them a bit disturbing or quirky. With a huge amount of active users, there are chances of a good amount of users face these issues. Among these, there are some persistent issues which a WordPress user will have encountered at least once in a WordPress lifetime. Fortunately, there’s already someone who has had the issue before, and there is already a solution.

In this article, we will go through some very disturbing WordPress problems and their solutions. Reading this, you’ll then be all set to face one of the issues and to implement a proper solution.

Always Have A Backup for the Safe Side

The first thing to always do in WordPress – after perfectly setting your website – is to make sure that you create a proper backup of your WordPress site. That will make sure that you have options for recovery once you face any issue. With backups, you can switch back to a previous point of time where your site was running with no issues at all.

You can directly backup your WordPress from your web hosting provider (if provided) or with plugins like Duplicator, BackupBuddy, VaultPress, etc.

The Problems and The Solutions

1. Internal Server Errors

The 500 Internal Server Error announces itself with just the error name. It doesn’t give the users the slightest clue on what is causing the error. We should then investigate and find out the problem on our own. For the ease of understanding the 500 Error, following are some cases that are causing it.

A faulty plugin can cause a 500 Internal Error on your website. In this case, you need to know the exact plugin which is causing the error. For this, deactivate all plugins at once and try activating one plugin at a time. This will help you find the faulty plugin and delete it. If you really need to use that plugin, you can contact its developer and ask for help.

Another cause of 500 Errors is the .htaccess files located in your website directory. You can find it when you log in to the directory with an FTP client. Try renaming the file to .htaccess_1 or .htaccess_old. After reloading the webpage, if the error is cleared, you have found the spot. You can now go to the permalinks section in the dashboard settings and save the settings once again so that your posts and pages don’t get a 404 error.

The 500 error can also be caused by a limited PHP memory. This is but light to handle. All you need to do is open the /wp-admin/folder through FTP and save a new text file in the folder with “memory=64MB” written inside it. If the error continues even after, it’s better to contact your hosting provider.

If all the above methods fail, try replacing the wp-admin and wp-includes files in the directory with that from a freshly installed WordPress. This helps you substitute the corrupt files if any during your installation process.

2. The WordPress Parse or Syntax Error

If any problem occurs while adding code snippets to your site using the functions.php file, this error pops up. Instead of the beautiful webs page, what will be displayed is a message just like above. But there is not a thing to worry, seriously!

The error can be eliminated by making the necessary corrections in your faulty code. Before doing that, there is one thing that should be taken care of. Always test your snippet codes in a test site before trying them on the live site. This will help eliminate the errors caused to the live site.

Fortunately, the parse error is something which is very straight forward. It tells you the file and the line where the error has occurred, which helps you solve it easily. You can either remove the code from the site or make a correction and reinstate it.

3. The Sidebar Error

This is an error that is often encountered while using WordPress. The sidebar error is caused mostly by an unclosed div on the web page. It is you or your fellow editors who are responsible for the sidebar error, as it occurs while you are making changes on the page. With this error, the sidebar will be seen below the content instead of getting displayed at its proper position.

To solve this, you should edit the page and try to remember what all changes you had made to the page lastly. If you can’t find it, use the W3C markup validation to help you out. In case you are using a custom theme, adjusting the theme proportions may help to display the sidebar correctly.

You can also try checking the float property and add a float to the settings for the sidebar to work correctly.

4. Failing to Receive a WordPress Mail

Emails are always a problem with WordPress beginners. They come up with issues of receiving emails more often. In most cases, the received emails go to the spam folder. This can be solved by whitelisting the email address.

In worst cases, you can use an SMTP plugin to make sure that the email is received. One of the reliable SMTP is the Gmail SMTP which can be accessed through any one of your Gmail accounts. Install and activate the Gmail SMTP plugin and configure the settings from Gmail SMTP in the admin settings of your WordPress.

WordPress Tips

You can use WordPress for Membership Sites. It is easy to create a members-only site using WordPress plugins. There are a lot of members-only website plugins available in the market, some free, some paid. With these membership plugins, you can create websites with premium content, gated communities, and much more. Use them to make paid/free membership websites.

5. Error Establishing a Database Connection

In case of Error Establishing Database Connection, WordPress is losing its connection with its database as the name depicts. The database, where all the WordPress content including the posts, pages, and all other information are saved, is the core of a WordPress website.

No WordPress website can exist without a database. This fails the website from loading when the database connection is lost. In most cases, faulty credentials inside wp-config.php are the main culprits behind this error. Let’s see the whole list of the error-makers:

1. Check wp-config.php

The wp-config.php file contains every information regarding the login to the database, which you have provided at the stage of installation including the database name, user name, password, and server name. The file is located in the root directory of your WordPress. If your connection to the database fails, inspect the credentials in this file and make the necessary changes.

2. Access the WordPress Admin (wp-admin)

When there occur issues with the database where WordPress should involve to repair it, visit the WordPress admin of your website (yourwebsite.com/wp-admin). Here, you’ll see an error message telling you to repair your database. In this case, open your wp-config.php file and add the below line:

define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);
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define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);

Then, go to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php and begin the repair. After the repairing is finished, remove the added line from the wp-config.php to avoid other people accessing this function.

3. Talk to Your Host

Now, if you try everything and things are still the same, it’s time to call for help. Contact your hosting provider and ask them to make necessary changes to the MySQL server or increase the size of the database.

6. Redirection Issues

Sometimes, there are issues of page redirects in WordPress. This may be due to improper configuration or programming of any tool in WordPress. This will create a looping effect when the website is loading, and will thus create a redirect loop, which will keep on redirecting.

The root cause of a redirect loop may be an incorrect URL in the WordPress Address or Site Address URL bar. To avoid such a condition, be sure to enter the proper address in these cases. Say, if the URL doesn’t have an ‘Http’ with it, avoid add it in the Address Bar as it will cause the redirect error.

Similar to the internal server error, the redirect error may also be caused due to a corrupt plugin. The solution is to deactivate all plugins and activate them one by one to see which plugin is causing the issue. You can then remove or repair it before activating it again.

7. Unresponsive Mobile Website

The most modern and simplest of the WordPress issues is the mobile responsive issue. This is caused by certain themes which are not responsive to mobile displays. The solution is to use mobile responsive themes, which are available in plenty in the market. If you need a mobile website, it’s better to choose the theme accordingly to suit your needs.

8. Connection Timed Out

If your WordPress website takes a lot of time to load and finally displays an error ‘Website not available’, then your connection has timed out.

A timed out connection tells you that your website is trying to do something heavy such that the server is not able to contain it. This error is most common in websites under shared hosting with limited resources.

Following are certain steps to solve a timed out connection:

Deactivate all plugins — Corrupt plugins can also create timeouts. Navigate to the upper sections to see out how to fix them.

Switching to a default theme — Timed out connections can also be caused due to faulty themes. In such cases, try one of the default WordPress themes or contact the theme’s developer to get it repaired.

Increase the PHP memory limit — Increasing memory limit is also discussed above. Just follow those steps.

If none of these solutions work for you, contact your hosting provider and let them do the rest.

Wrapping Up

As one of the biggest CMS platforms, WordPress has many problems, but also has a lot of solutions, thanks to millions of WordPress users. We really hope we solved your problem from the above solutions. If we missed something, let us know through the comments so that we can upgrade the article with the missing bits. Happy WordPressing! 🙂