Wordpress is a popular website-building platform that many people use, and it provides website creators with a lot of creative freedom. With so many options on Wordpress to create your websites, there is a chance you might run into errors at some point in the development process. Here is a list of common Wordpress errors and how to solve them.
Jump To Fatal Errors
Jump To Parse Errors
Jump To Database Connection Error
Jump To Updates Not Appearing
Jump To Redirect Error
Jump To Images Not Uploading
Jump To Emails Failing to Send
White Page: Your site loads with a blank page.
There are a few possibilities of what might be causing this white page. The most common causes would be a plugin or theme that is no longer working correctly or needs to be updated. The best option to determine which plugin or theme is causing the issue would be to disable the theme or plugins one at a time, while refreshing the site to see when the problem has been resolved.
There are a couple of different ways to disable plugins or the them depending on the hosting package you have. If you have a shared or reseller hosting account, more than likely you did a one-click install through Softaculous. If so you will log directly into your Wordpress dashboard and go to the Appearance section of tabs. There you be able to click the plugin or themes tab and manage everything from there.
Alternatively, If you have a Wordpress Hosting package there are a lot of tools at your disposal built into the billing portal. When you login to the portal you'll click on the Wordpress Icon on the very left, and then click Manage on the Wordpress install you're working on.
Once this page opens you'll see the overview page listing site data. To access the plugins or themes just click on either option, which are both in the column of tabs to the left. There you have the option to deactivate or switch any themes or plugins, and you still have the option to log directly into the Wordpress dashboard to manage them as well.
Another error you may get when attempting to load your website, or going to the WP-Admin login page is a memory error that starts out as “Fatal error: Allowed memory site of”. This error usually means that the page you're loading is exceeding the maximum possible memory allocated for your cPanel or server.
One of the common reasons that your site might be using a lot of memory is that there may be some type of action on that page that requires a significant amount of memory. An example of this would be a plugin or widget that's using an abnormal amount of memory. The easiest was to fix this to go into your cPanel and scroll down to the section of icons titled SOFTWARE, and click on the icon MultiPHP INI Editor.
Next you will be asked to select the domain for which you would like to update settings.
Once this page has loaded you should now see all of the PHP directives, and the one pertaining to the fatal error would be the memory_limit. You are able to change the memory amount to a higher allocation, which typically will resolve the fatal error. Always remember to click the Apply button to save the changes.
The next type of issue we'll cover are Parse errors. This kind of error usually only appears when someone is updating a code for the site. Typically when the error is caused by an issue in the code, the error message will display the exact path and line the issue is located on.
This may appear if one of the active plugins or the theme you have installed needs to be updated. The easiest way you can troubleshoot this is to deactivate the plugins one by one and refreshing the site. If the site comes back on after turning a certain plugin off, its recommended to check if there are any available updates, if not then reach out to the developer to check if the plugin is still supported and what they suggest.
Error Establishing a Database Connection
If you get an Error Establishing a Database Connection error page when visiting your website page, it usually is caused by an issue stemming from the database that is associated with the Wordpress installation.
The main cause of this type of error would be a misconfiguration in the wp-config.php file that would be located in file manager in your cPanel.
Once you have found the wp-config.php file you will need to click on Edit so it will open a new tab to view the content of the file. In the wp-config.php file, you will need to scroll down until you get to the MySQL settings. In this section, you will check the credentials to make sure that they are accurate to what you have for the database. This in most cases will resolve the error establishing a database connection page.
Updates Do Not Appear on Website
The most common reason that you would not be able to see your changes on the live site is because the site is cached. It basically means that the web browser your using, or the Wordpress installation has captured an image of your site. This is usually a benefit because it's using that capture to help load the site a lot faster, but unfortunately it contains old content in this case, which is not letting you see the new changes. In cases that it is on the browser side you will need to clear the cache in that browser. For example in Chrome go into your browser settings (the 3 vertical dots to the right of the address bar). Go to History or More Tools to clear the cache & cookies. Its recommended to choose the time range option All Time.
If Wordpress is where the caching issue is coming from you will need to log into the Wordpress dashboard to clear the cache. All Wordpress installations done through the cPanel via Softaculous, the caching plugin W3 Total Cache will be installed by default. The option to purge cache will be on the top tool bar under Performance, this will purge all cache through the Wordpress site. This may vary how it shows if you use a different plugin for caching.
A redirecting error page can look different depending the type of redirect the page is trying to do. This type of error is generally created when the redirect that you are trying to do is incorrect, not compatible, or conflicting with something on the page.
The most common example of getting a redirect error will be caused when you're using a SEO plugin that is trying to change the URL for the site. In this case you will just need to turn off the plugin and that should solve the problem.
Another common example is when your are trying to redirect a page to an outside source, for example a shopping site or a social media account. These will mostly come from a widget plugin that is not working correctly. You will need to disable the plug in and check to see the plugin needs any updates or certain preferences. There are also times that you are using a type of redirect plugin to do the same action, for example 301 redirects, redirection, and Yoast SEO. The same solution applies to this scenarios.
There is an alternative to do a simple page to page redirect, this would be located in your cPanel. Once you are logged into the cPanel you will need to scroll down to get to the section of icons titled DOMAINS and click on Redirects. This method will provide an easy alternative for setting up redirects if you don't want to install or use another third-party plugin.
For more detailed explanation on this process visit:
There are some cases when that you are trying to upload an image through the Wordpress Media option and its not uploading or maybe it does upload and the image is blank or broken. In these situations the common cause would be would be a file or folder persimmon issue. For these kinds of situations you will need to log into your cPanel and go into the File Manager. Once there your will go to your websites directory and to the far right of each file and folder you will see the permission number. The default permission for folders are 755 and for files 644. If you see some that are not set to the default permission and you did not make the change it is recommend to set them to default.
Another issue caused by plugins, would be a visitor on your site attempting to contact you via the "Contact Us" plugin installed on your site. In this situation your customer will fill out the form and they wont get a confirmation email or the automated reply. Another example would be when you have a mailing list for a subscription and some subscribers do not receive their email. These issues are usually are cause by a misconfiguration of the mail server that the plugin installed is using to send out emails. The best way to fix this issue would be to install a SMTP plugin that will allow you manually set up the mail server settings. Another option would be to check to see if the plugin that you are using has an option to adjust its mail server settings. If you need the email settings, you are able to find them in your cPanel in the email accounts.
For more details on how to get these settings visit:
Third-Party Email Client Settings