 common troubleshooting tips. I'm Taylor, this is Amanda pointing in the wrong direction. And we got a lot to cover, so I think we're going to dig right into it, but we're going to cover various things that may happen to WordPress that come up pretty often, and how you can fix that. We're going to talk about HTTPS a little bit, and we'll show how you can access backups and restore them. It's kind of the main overview here. Before we dig into the technical stuff there, we wanted to also highlight the support documentation. Yeah, definitely. I think that this is a great place to bring everyone's attention to in the first place, because we're going to be actually drawing on these as we go through our topics in this session. So we have an entire section in our support knowledge-based area that is dedicated to Domain of One Zone. There's a ton of really useful stuff in here. A lot of what we're going to be doing is kind of like the top most popular things, but we have a huge variety of things that folks have come to us about and have solved, and we've been able to kind of document that. So this is always a great place to start when you're trying to figure out what the issue might be for a student, faculty member, for yourself. And then, of course, it's also very easy to submit a request in here if there's something that you simply can't figure out. Yeah. And one thing I kind of didn't even think about when I first pulled this up is, of course, there is this Domain of One Zone section, but a lot of our entire support documentation is going to apply. So some of the things we're going to be doing today with WordPress doesn't live in Domain of One Zone because this could apply to literally anyone that's running WordPress. So we'll get into that in a second. But the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to fix a WordPress site that won't load. So I'm going to actually pull up. This isn't exactly the error we're going to be seeing, but it's very similar. So we're actually going to use this guide, and I'm going to kind of mention it here. It's linked in the video description in additional reading, but I also just threw it in Discord. And the guide, we're going to be roughly following. But basically, we've got a WordPress site here that when you visit it, it's tailoredest.stateu.org slash wp-demo just doesn't load. There's nothing on the screen. And if I try to get into the admin interface for it, I get a critical error from WordPress. So for end users, this can be extremely scary because it's like, okay, I broke something and I can't even undo whatever I just did, right, is what it seems like for them. So this is something that can happen, and we're going to kind of talk about what tools you have available to you. So first thing I'm going to do, I'm actually going to log out here. If you're helping, say a faculty member has this site and has broken it, you're going to want to log into your WordPress dashboard. So I'm going to log in to state you in my particular case here. And I'm going to go to the users panel. I'm going to find the person whose site it is. And this is the account I'm using. So I'll switch to them. And now I'm in their CPAN. So that's step one for looking at their WordPress site. So if I go to my apps, I can see that there's one WordPress site in here, and this is the one that's broken. I can click on it, look at that. It's blank. I can try to use the magic link to log in automatically. That's also not going to work. Okay. So what do we do? If you look at our article here, we talk about checking out the error log in the file manager and also how you can turn off plugins or even themes without logging into WordPress. So let's do that. Let's go to the file manager here in CPANL. And if I go to public HTML, WP demo, that's where I installed this particular site. And in this particular case, it's giving me a loud memory size byte exhausted public HTML WP demo WP includes. Okay. So this is kind of weird and doesn't give me a lot to go off of, to be honest. Sometimes you'll see in the error log specific references to a particular plugin or a particular theme that has an issue. And then you know that you can maybe disable just that one and be good to go. So I'll kind of talk about what that looks like. Say it's a theme. If I went in my themes folder, I could simply, whatever theme the site was currently using, or as mentioned in the error log, I could simply rename the folder to something else, just something that's not what it is right now. So say it was 2021. I could right click in the file manager here, rename it to 2021.off, I don't know. It doesn't really matter what you actually name it, as long as it's not the same thing. And when you'd reload WordPress, what you'd find is it would default to using a different theme that was in the folder already. And that would let you get access to the admin dashboard and proceed from there. What's probably even more common, though, than a broken theme in my experience is broken plugins. And the best way to sort of revive a site is to just turn off all the plugins. So you could go into a plugins folder. And we're going to pretend that we're not looking at this because there's some obvious clues to what's broken here. And we have a plugin called WPbreaker. But you could rename specific plugin folders. And I'm going to make this a little bit larger here. Say I didn't want cookies for comments on. I could rename it the same way I renamed my theme folder. But for now, I'm going to just turn off all the plugins and rename it the whole plugins folder. So this is, again, I went into the file manager, public HTML, the folder that the WordPress site was in, and then WP content. So I'm going to rename my plugins folder to plugins.off. That's just what I like to do. But like I said, you could rename to almost anything. Now let's see if we can load the WordPress site. There we go. So it loads. Now the big one is we had to see if the back end, the dashboard loads should. Okay, great. So now that it loads, I can actually go back into the plugins folder and change it back because now that WordPress has loaded without any plugins, it's not going to automatically turn them right back on. You have to manually turn on the ones you want to turn on. Oh, I'm wrong about that. I think I have to visit the plugins page at least once. I think is how that works. Okay, so let me rename it again. Now if I go to the plugins page, it's going to give me a bunch of errors. It says, hey, this has been deactivated due to an error. That's because it can't find the plugin anymore. So the plugins folder is just empty as far as it's concerned. Now let me rename this again. And now that I've visited the plugins page and it deactivated them, you'll get the full list of plugins. And you can re-enable plugins one at a time until you have an issue. So there's some fishy plugins in this list. This is like a particularly easy one. But I'll re-activate cookies for comments, limit login attempts. Yeah, that's fine. These are plugins we have on pretty much everything. WordPress importers, probably fine. Subscribe to comments. Let's try Taylor's busted plugin. It's at version 100. So it's had a lot of development. It's probably really reliable. That's good. What about Taylor's other plugin? Bam. Okay, that broke it. So in this particular case, it looks like that one plugin called Taylor's other plugin is the thing that's breaking something. So let me go in to plugins. And typically, plugins are named the same or something indicating it. In my particular demo here, it's not. But I can also just rename an individual plugin, like I mentioned before. Let's do that. And there we go. Got the site back. So this particular plugin is pretty fishy. We probably don't want to re-activate it. We probably want to delete it. But it just kind of goes to show that not only can an individual plugin break a site, in certain cases, combinations of plugins can have an effect on a site. So being able to turn all of them off from the file manager is just a fantastic tool to have in your tool belt, really. Another really common thing that you're going to have folks do with WordPress sites is changing the site URL field in WordPress directly. So we have an article on this as well. And basically what happens is there's a setting in WordPress under, I think, general. Yep. That includes WordPress, includes the domain and URL of the site. There are almost zero times on domain of one's own or shared hosting setups where you actually want to change this from here. And that's simply because of the way that WordPress is served up in a environment like shared hosting. Frankly, I would love to just remove these fields from WordPress. That would be great. But they're here. So what will happen sometimes is you'll have a student that's maybe claimed the domain name like Taylor test.state.org. And they go, I'd really have, rather have Taylor Jaden.state.org. So I'll change that. And they could change it in one or both of these places. Hey, Taylor, can you zoom in on that a bit? Oh, yeah. Thank you. There we go. So say they change this, this was Taylor test, and they decide, I wish I would have had Taylor Jaden instead of instead. So they go in here and they hit save. And all of a sudden their site doesn't load anymore. Let me get rid of this long URL. Yeah, it's not loading at all. So how do you fix that? So looking at this particular article that Amanda just put in the Discord, we can actually change this, but we have to change this in the WordPress database. So how do you do that? What's the best way? So going back to the cPanel account and keeping in mind, again, that you get here by switching to the user from WordPress, from your WordPress front end on Dominated One's own. If we go back to my apps, we can actually click on, oh, I'm in the wrong, sorry, I have two cPanels going on over here. Okay, so we can go back to my apps. If we click on this little wrench, we can actually see more details about the site. And if we go to files and tables, it'll one show us where the files for that particular site are located. But it will also show what the name of the database is that we're dealing with. So it looks like it's HHY, this garbage underscore WP1. This is really important if you have more than one WordPress site or other site on the account that you're dealing with. So we can actually click on that, and that will open up PHP My Admin. Now, a little quirk of the switch to thing is that that may not actually work, and you may have to go around to back to your cPanel home and then go down into the PHP My Admin section here in cPanel. I normally am searching for this, just using the search at the top, but it is in the databases section. If you click on that, it'll load PHP My Admin, which is a sort of visual editor for the database. So I can click on the one that ends in WP1, and then I'm going to want to go to the WP options table. And then often right at the top, but not always, you may have to use the filter or even change the number of rows displayed to display more rows. But in my experience, usually right at the top, you will see both the site URL and home fields. That's where those settings that we changed in WordPress live. So all we need to do is just change us back to coincide with the actual domain name that they have. So if I go back to my cPanel and look at the top, I'll notice that it's supposed to be TaylorTest.StateU.org. So I can put that back, TaylorTest. And I can do the same thing here. And I did it by double clicking on the fields and hitting Enter. You can also use the Edit button to do the same thing. And then you just have to scroll down and hit Go. But now, if I try to reload the site, still doesn't work. Oh, I didn't fix my where I'm trying to visit. TaylorTest. There we go. So now the site loads. So those are two super common situations. Well, super common. I think probably the most common situations that you can find people getting themselves into with WordPress. Kind of going forward from here. This one I think is less common, but is good to know about. And that is dealing with HTTPS issues, basically. By default, every time someone makes a domain or a sub-domain or a new site, it's going to see panels automatically going to issue a SSL certificate so that the site loads over HTTPS. The problem is that can take time depending on the setup. And this is complicated. Basically, the services that exist out there to offer free HTTPS certificates are limited. And sometimes they have really high traffic and they say, hey, buddy, you got to wait a couple minutes before we can give you a cert. It's pretty common. Usually simply waiting five to 10 minutes is all you need to do. But sometimes you're demoing something and you want it to load properly right away. Or maybe sometimes something is broken and it isn't getting a cert after a few minutes. In either case, you can always manually issue a cert. So I'm going to make a new sub-domain and try to issue a cert to it before C-panel actually gets to it. This may not actually demo okay, but you'll still get the point even if it's not perfect. So I'm going to make a new sub-domain. I'm in C-panel. I'm using the sub-domains button under the domain section. I'm going to make my cool sub-domain and we'll hit Create. I'm not even really going to install anything there at the moment. And then you can always manually issue certs by looking for let's encrypt, which is in the security section. Again, I usually type it in the search bar. But if I go here, you'll notice that Taylor test, it says this one already has a certificate. Great. But you can also go here and issue a certificate for any other sub-domains that you already have. So I just made my cool sub-domain. So I'm going to issue, it's going to ask you like if you want wildcard or C-panel sub-domains, you typically don't need to worry about this. And then you can just hit the issue button. And there you go. So now it has issued a cert for my cool sub-domain.TaylorTest.StateU.org. Again, I don't have anything here. Oh, it's, and sometimes it does take it a second. I'm going to give it another, a little bit of time. There we go. Now I have a cert. Again, nothing installed here. So it takes about, you click the button, it'll say it's working on it. And it takes another 10 seconds typically. This is great because you just simply don't have to wait if the service that normally does this is being pokey for you. And the reason this works this way, by the way, is there are actually two different services we use for HTTPS certs. So sometimes the one that C-panel defaults to is busy and is going to make you wait a couple minutes. So it's a great thing to know about. Finally, we're going to talk about backups. And backups using JetBackup are kind of your ultimate option whenever you're having an issue. If someone says they broke something or something has broken, and they know, hey, it was working yesterday, it's not working today, or it was working last week, this is almost always going to be your best option to start to troubleshoot something that is complicated. We have, if you look in our knowledge base, a ton of articles on JetBackup. We have one that we can link on restoring a full C-panel account that we'll use in just a second. You can restore individual files, you can store databases, all kinds of things. I also really just like this benefits of JetBackup in C-panel article that kind of covers a lot of the different things that are possible to do with JetBackup. So it's a good overview basically. And it also mentions here what you should expect JetBackup to have. So they have, we have at any given time three daily backups, two weekly backups, and two monthly backups. We'll show what exactly what that looks like in a second. But JetBackup is great, and you can do a lot with it. So I just made my StateU account pulling back curtain here like this morning for the purposes of this session. So it's not actually going to have any backups because they happen at night. So I'm actually going to switch over to my own personal shared hosting account from my website, which is jaden.me. That will have JetBackup history. But it works exactly the same way. Once you're in a C-panel, you can just go to the file section and then JetBackup, or of course you can search for it. And when you click on this, you'll get a bunch of different options. So you can do full backups, which will roll back your entire account. You can do file backups, which will restore a or a file or folder or multiple files or folders. You can do cron jobs, which is restoring like scheduled jobs. I've never actually needed this one, but it's neat that it's there. DNS zone, this is neat. If someone makes just a DNS change that breaks something and you're not exactly sure what it was before, you can use the DNS zone setting, sorry, the DNS zone backups to actually restore any individual domain on your account back in time, which is super neat. And they are made on the same schedule. All of these backups are made on the same schedule. But again, these are for each individual domain. I have a lot of domain names linked into my account, so I have an entry, a daily entry for, well, a lot. I have five. So I have five entries for each backup, which is super neat. So you can restore your DNS settings back. You can also do individual databases, email, and then the queue just lets you look at what tasks are currently processing basically if you are currently restoring a backup. Most often though, what I want is the full backups. I just want to take my whole account and move it back, but I just wanted to point out all those different options because sometimes you want to restore just an individual like say WordPress site, and that can be handy to know that you can just do a file backup and a database backup. And if you do both of those, you can affect only one site instead of your entire account. But for my purposes here, we'll look at the full backup section. And I'm actually going to do this because I did make changes to my site somewhat recently, so I don't actually want to restore my whole backup, my whole site from a backup, but we can do just about everything up to that. Couple things here. This type is not very useful or important for the purposes of all of the backups will include all of the files. The type is more useful for us at Reclaim. I don't really know why they put this here. The JetBackup folks. The one you're going to want to look at most of the time is this creation date column, and you can sort by creation date. Also keeping in mind that I think by default it's going to show you the oldest backups first, which is a strange decision in my opinion. So usually you want to sort and look at your most recent. So I have a backup as of this morning, keeping in mind that these backups are dated with the server time, not your local time. So this is 10.55 am UTC. And then you can either download the backup directly. If you want to download a backup and keep it for later, anyone that has admin access to the server could upload that backup file. Don't normally need that, but it's nice to know about. But the Restorer is the one that you probably actually want. And if you click on that, it'll say, all right, add it to the Restore queue. And if I do that, it'll show up in the queue. Restoring a JetBackup full account, the amount of time will depend on the size of the account and how much storage space they're using primarily is the big one. But in my experience, it can take 10, 15, even 20 or 30 minutes for a really large account. But don't expect it to take one or two minutes. It's probably going to be five to 10 minutes at the very least. When you hit this, like I said, it will say, all right, your backup has been queued. And you can simply go to the queue section in JetBackup and it will show you the status of it. The file backups is very similar. When I mentioned that you can restore individual files or folders, I just wanted to show what that actually looks like in here. If the difference is, you get an actual file manager to browse what you want to restore. So if I look at that Wednesday backup and I click on it, and we'll take it a little bit to load in here that has to kind of open the whole backup file, I can go to any folder in my account. Maybe I want to go to my main site here. I can look at any of these and say, yeah, I want to change my, like this folder, this folder, and this folder. And I want to restore those. You can add them in a restore queue. You can even just download those files. So if I hit this download button, it'll simply get those folders ready for download and give them to you. So I think for my purposes here, I'm actually going to go back up and I'm going to grab my entire public HTML folder. And I'm going to hit download and hit add to download queue. And it's going to start zipping that up for me so I can download it later. Super handy. Again, if you just want to hang onto it for later, or maybe you want to manually look at how it was set up before, just a great option. So yeah, so that's jet backup. And if you're having any questions about jet backup, or like, I don't know if I should in this case, like, of course, reach out to reclaim support. But I think it's always good to know what tools are out there. We can always help you with these, but want to make sure that you feel empowered too. Anything we should add, Amanda? I don't think so. I would be curious if folks have questions about backups because I know, you know, some people write in and are worried that they don't have backups, or if a backup isn't automatically going through, if that's a problem, that you should be covered with backups. Yeah. I wanted to highlight what Pilot mentioned here. If you're working with users who are manually building their sites, that this is super handy. Yeah, it's great. I am one of those people. I don't use WordPress for my main site, so having this as a backup option is like super great for me to be able to kind of look at and roll back changes. If I go back and jet back up here, I want to kind of show that queue option I was mentioning. So you can see right here, I went here and it says, all right, your queue is done. It's ready to go. You can delete this. They will expire eventually. You don't really have to go in here and manually clean them up because they're not taking up space in your account. But you can hit this download button and I'll download that entire zipped up folder that it's created for me. My case is not real big. It's like 75 megabytes. But yeah, super great. And like I said, I downloaded this, but I also could have told it to restore, in which case it would have just directly restored the files right into my account. But yeah, and here we go. Here's my site from yesterday. So yeah, it's a great option. I love jet backup. And I think we're just about out of time. So I think we'll call her here and we will see everyone. We've got a little break here for about a half an hour. And then we'll be back with long term management at that time. And we'll be, Pilate and I will be talking about restoring, or sorry, cleaning up accounts and how to manage those long term strategies. So see everybody then. See you then.