 Welcome, Kristen Faulkner. I promise I will. What? Exactly. Yeah, they also said that this mic, and I talk, yeah, loud. Hi guys. My name is Kristen Faulkner. First of all, thanks in advance for kind of bearing with me as I powered through a speaker no-no of having something in my mouth. My immune system is kind of a diva and picks like the worst times to crap out on me, so I'm kind of fighting a chest cold. So I have some cough drop action happening up here to power me through. I am going to be talking about troubleshooting common WordPress errors today. I'm a freelance WordPress developer. I'm also completely self-talk. So I don't want to brag, but I've broken a lot of WordPress sites. What I am going to be covering today is I'm going to be talking about some general tips just when you're in the troubleshooting process. I'm going to go over a couple of specific errors in how to fix them, and then I'm going to be talking about some best practices moving forward. First, what you'll need to troubleshoot. If you aren't already familiar with something like FTP or SFTP or something to access the files for your site, I would recommend kind of investigating there. I don't have time to kind of in-depth explain how to use something like this, but essentially I'm just trying to recommend not being reliant just on the WordPress admin access or the WordPress editor, because some errors are going to take down your admin. If you can't access your site files a different way, then you're going to have some problems troubleshooting those. I would also say just in this area be familiar with where your site's hosted. It's actually kind of mind-blowing to me how many people don't know where their site is hosted, or don't know how to log in to their hosting company, or anything like that. So just have those credentials on file so when you need them you know you can hop in there. Okay, so just some tips. I get this as a developer who troubleshoots for other people. I have people come to me and tell me that they didn't touch anything on their site, and just a fairy came in and ruined it and nothing was done. This is not going to happen ever. I don't know how to say that any clearer. If nothing is changing, if you're not updating anything, if your host isn't updating anything, your site's just not going to suddenly stop working. So there's always going to be something that triggers it. So really what I would take away from this is be present to what you are doing on your WordPress site. Even today, I never will go and select update every plugin that needs to update. I'll update them one at a time, and just make sure that everything's good to go. So just kind of be aware of what you're doing in the admin, and then if you do have to reach out to somebody like me, I would literally rather you say you didn't know what the delete key did and you hit it than tell me that you didn't touch anything. Because then I have to try to figure out what did you touch. The next thing I'd give you a tip is read the words on your screen if you get an error. I troubleshooted an iPad issue for my aunt, and she said it kept showing an error and she would just hit okay. I was like, what does the error say? Oh, I don't know. I just closed out of it. Well, those words mean something. If you don't recognize what they mean, Google does. So just copy and paste that, sucker. Over in the Google, you'll find somebody who has lived that life solved that problem. And you'll have a nice, handy little I'd recommend doing these things. Unlike me and my fierce public speaking right now where I can't take a deep breath. If you can take a deep breath when your stuff is all a mess, I would recommend doing it. A lot of people get very like the world is in a like everything's ruined. My side's gone. Like it's all gone. And you get so like panicky and so like, you know, in this dark place that it's hard for you to kind of rationally figure out like how do we fix it from here? So just it's a website. It's going to be okay. A lot of it looks way worse than it is. So just like take a deep breath and we'll solve it. So let's go into some specific errors that you might see. Let's say that maybe your home page is working but maybe every subpage on your site is a 404 error. You can see them in the back end. It all looks fine. But this seems really tragic and it seems like things are really broken. A lot of times it's literally a button click and it's fixed. You just need to a lot of times reset your permalinks which is under settings permalinks. It's like the URL structure of the WordPress site. I'll see this error triggered a lot in like a migration if you're moving your site from one host to another or if you're doing anything with a plugin that messes with your permalinks or does some kind of rewrite structure or does something like that. But most of the time if you can access your home page but you can't access any of your subpages it's literally just like refreshing those permalinks and you're going to be good to go. Another fun error is when your site will just display error establishing a database connection. A lot of times you will see this when you're initially setting WordPress up and most of the time if it's in that case your credentials to set WordPress up are incorrect. Your passwords wrong. I feel like most commonly because in your configuration file for WordPress you have to put the database server and it defaults to something called local host. Some hosts you have to put something else there and I feel like sometimes people overlook that step. Some hosts that I know that you do this I think GoDaddy on certain ones I think MediaTemple but there are certain hosts where you have to put something specific there. If you have not touched anything on your site and you see this it's entirely possible that your host is having an issue with their database server. So just reach out to your hosting company and another thing I would say if you are reaching out to your hosting company about anything that might be wrong these are human beings and it wasn't their plan to ruin your site I feel like some people come at people with this fire and fury and I feel like just a friendly let's solve this together kind of helps people everybody helping each other. Syntax Errors A lot of times if you have a syntax error on your screen it will just say syntax error and it will list a file. A lot of times this happens if you are copying and pasting code from somewhere else into your WordPress site. In an ideal world you are never doing this you are never pasting code that you don't understand into your WordPress site but at the same time I think any developer would be a liar if they said that they never worked with code or found a solution somewhere else and kind of tried to work with that to solve their problems. So a lot of times if you are working with code and you pop something into your themes functions file and all of a sudden you see a syntax error it's that code that you just popped in there and maybe it's something minor like it's just like you miss the last closing bracket when you copy and pasted it or there is an error in the code itself but if ever you are tweaking your theme file I would keep that open like paste whatever you are going to paste in there refresh your site make sure everything is fine and then if it's not you can just remove that code and keep going but I feel like syntax errors a lot of times are surfacing because of you know inherent issues in code that like your site is using in a theme or a plugin occasionally now I am going to be honest on this error this comes up on a lot of like common WordPress error blog posts in my entire career of working with WordPress I have seen this happen once but by golly I knew how to fix it when it happened to me so just file this away for just a rainy day when this might surface out of the blue when WordPress is updating your plugins or updating core it pops your site into maintenance mode so nobody is you know visiting it while it's updating you know nobody is seeing like everything kind of wonky while files are updating if for some reason something happens and WordPress can't auto remove what it does then you might see a message like this your sites are done you can log into your admin but anytime you're visiting the front end you're just seeing a message like this and it's literally as simple as logging in hang on just a second do you have a question and deleting the dot maintenance file from your site's directory and then everything will be up and running just because of the level of the information you're giving you said something about people using FTP they're not familiar with it and they're using FTP and this is not they might have to turn on show invisible show invisible files or show hidden files or something like that because anything that has you know a dot whatever even like dot ht access or anything like that you may need to do something like that to see those files yes what do you do if you delete the maintenance file and it's still stuck on the wipe well in the web developer section you can delete the application cache like they're excuse me in Chrome or whatever your browser is open up that web developer tools and then I think there's an application tab in Chrome I don't know what you're going to call it in others and then there's going to be down the side on the area where it says cookies you can go into cookies and then I think you'll have multiple cookies usually per then go into whichever one it is delete all the cookies that are associated with that some stuff can definitely be triggered from like your local cache so sometimes clearing that and visiting your site either in a different browser or using something like an incognito mode tab can also get you around that let's say that you cannot upload media files or all of a sudden everything in your media file your media library is broken a lot of times I only see this when a site's been migrated when it's moving to a new host and a lot of times it's just an issue like WordPress can't write to the uploads directory a lot of times the folder permissions on the uploads directory aren't correct and I know some of this if you hear it and you're like folder permissions I don't even know what to do with that like this is just even if you kind of have an idea of what the problem is like your hosting support could help you or a developer that you work with can help you but sometimes just knowing what's behind this a lot of times like I said this is because WordPress literally just can't write to that uploads folder this is everybody's favorite because it has such a great name the white screen of death so when this is happening your site's not displaying anything at all it doesn't give you an error message PHP is just like nope, not doing any of this so I feel like a lot of times this is caused by like memory exhaustion and I'm gonna go into how you can increase WordPress memory it can also be caused by kind of a rogue plugin update that's causing issues or a theme update or something like that so this is never a fun one to fix just because you don't have the same kind of clues that you do on another one so I'm gonna go into the memory limits and then I'm gonna talk about working with like WP Debug which can also shut some light on a PHP white screen of death issue so increasing the WordPress memory limit I feel like servers these days are starting at a higher PHP memory limit than they were so common to have to do this but I feel like it's less common but you may still need to increase the memory limit on your server symptoms that you may need to do this are like I said like a white screen of death like internal server errors can sometimes crop up you might see something that just says like memory exhaustion something bites of something bites so how you can increase the WordPress memory limit there's a couple different ways one is you can edit the WP config file and place in this line that's here all of my slides also are on my session page so you can download those and then you have this to refer back to some hosts that actually won't take effect you can put that in there and the host just will ignore it another thing you can try if a host isn't recognizing that is you can edit your ht access file and increase the memory limit that way some hosts still won't do it and it's more of a matter of tracking on the php.ini file now all of this again could be like this is not something that I ever want to personally deal with a lot of times hosting support will kind of help guide you here if you know that you do need a php like memory increase so you can reach out and kind of just let them know what you're trying to do and they can you know kind of hold your hand a bit better on doing this if you need to address plugin conflicts like you add a plugin and your site's broken or you update a plugin and your site's broken the best thing to do is kind of deactivate all of your plugins if you have access to your admin it's really easy to do because you can just go into your plugins section highlight them all and choose deactivate and then just kind of one by one go through and see where the problem lies however sometimes you'll have an issue that takes down your admin so you can't go in and address your plugins in that case if you access your site through something like ftp you can actually rename your plugins folder to something like plugins underscore old or something like that and it's going to take all your plugins you know off your site and you can gradually like one by one move them over once you find the issue the plugin issue you can either replace the plugin with something that does a comparable thing a lot of times there are several plugins that ultimately are doing the same task you can also flag the issue on the plugins support forums again I would kind of note the same kind of thing about if you are reaching out to like hosting support you're dealing with somebody who's probably made their plugin available for free they're also doing support for free so you know if you come at them like your plugin ruined my life like write better code like this is garbage like you know they're not going to be like I would love to help this person solve the issue that they're having but if you know you know appreciate their work and acknowledge it and kind of explain that you'd really love to continue using it but you're seeing this issue then the developer may have more of a desire to help you solve that problem another thing that you can use I would recommend doing this more in like local environments or staging environments which I'm going to continue to cover WordPress has a built in like debugging system and you can enable it really easily in the config file and there are actually I didn't go into in depth details of different settings that you can do here but you can do different things like you can have it instead of just echoing errors out onto your site you can have it just log them so if you do happen to need to use this in a production environment I would definitely have it just log the errors versus spit them out on your site I always think WP debug is fascinating because you can have a site that's like running fine and looks completely fine and if you would pull that down and put WP debug on you would see like PHP warnings and like all this it would just light up with stuff that's wrong so I always think that WP debug is really it's a helpful tool I like to use it before I roll any custom theme out just to kind of make sure that there's nothing that's you know not an obvious like site crippling issue but it still needs like code that needs to be tweaked to eliminate a warning or anything like that okay so when you're working with a WordPress site when I was initially starting out developing I was just making changes to live production sites like via FTP because I wanted to play with fire and now I regret like everything that I used to do in my old like method of doing business but you should not just have a production site that you're like playing around on as well or like rolling out new plugins on you should have your production site and then you should have at least a staging site and that's just a copy of your production site that you can like test new plugins on or you know test a code change on or maybe change if you're going to change your theme or you're going to you know do something else this should all be happening on staging first and then you're doing it on production versus you know just doing everything live essentially because if you have a staging environment and if you also have a local environment which I'm going to continue on to talk about you're really minimizing the odds of ever having like an error surface on your production site because nothing's happening there that you haven't already done somewhere else so you've already seen if an error is going to surface or you know tweaked your method of accomplishing whatever so staging environments and local environments are really helpful now local environments they exist solely on your computer I always as a developer I develop locally now a huge benefit to local environments is it used to be like if the internet was down like my day was ruined like it was nothing was going to get done and now if the internet's down you know I can still work effectively locally because your local environment doesn't need to power your site you know it's all happening internally so local environments are really great now I know you might be saying like I have no idea how to set up a local environment you're in luck there are some applications that make it unbelievably simple to set up a local environment this top server is one I personally like to use it just because it's very like simplistic it's very like create a new wordpress site you enter in the URL that you want to access the local wordpress site on and it's up and running with a local instance for you getting your production site over to it there are plugins like like duplicator or any kind of like wordpress clone kind of plugin that can just pull your production site there and then you have a local site that you can work with desktop server also has a premium version that you can easily like deploy to a production environment and it has some additional features you can kind of check that out to read their feature set local by flywheel is another option that's newer on the scene I know you'd never guess from the name but flywheel is behind it and I would really recommend using it if you have flywheel hosting especially because it's integrated extremely well with flywheel hosting where I think local by flywheel has some benefits over desktop server is you have a bit more control there over like I want to set this install up using like PHP 7 and you can match your server specs a little bit better with desktop server it's literally just you're creating you know a site and you don't have as fine tuned control by default there over what the like kind of back end specs are local by flywheel is free you do give your email address you do get a chunk of marketing emails but it's a free awesome service and if you need a staging environment for your site and not stress how easy it is to get up and running locally with one of these applications it's so beyond worth it to have a local install that you can work with there if you're a little bit more like I want to set it all up myself then you know there are other options for you like the big grant and some other things that you can you know get up and running on your computer but most people they are already you know if you know enough to use those things then you probably already have local environments set up so if you need a bit more like I just don't even want to think about it I want to make this as easy as humanly possible then I would do one of these apps that kind of holds your hand a bit more WordPress backups there is literally no reason on this earth that you should not be backing up your WordPress site it's beyond easy to do a lot of hosts these days are coming like their plan includes backups so if you have a hosting plan you might want to do some investigating like see if backups are a part of that if you are hosted with any kind of specialized WordPress host like WPN Gen or Flywheel or Pantheon or any of those then a lot of times they do have WordPress backups as part of their system so you know obviously if it's something that you don't even need to set up then that's great however even if it doesn't it's incredibly easy to start setting these up there are a wealth of backup plugins out there I really like Vaultpress just because it's made by automatic it's not free but the cost is very very minimal and it's literally like set it and forget it like automatic backup kind of thing I think it does daily backups of your site and it also helps with like one click restores you know backups are essentially like an insurance policy for your site and you don't need a backup until you really really really really really need a backup so I have thankfully never had to backup my site from the backup but I would never in a million years cancel it just because it's just a peace of mind kind of thing and then even if you do some crazy thing and you've ruined your site beyond a recoverable point restore and it's like it never happened finally as a last resort if you are hearing these words coming out of my mouth and you're like I don't need a backup and later you find that you do need a backup you can reach out to your host a lot of hosts even if they don't have backups as part of their plan they are backing up their client installs a lot of times they won't restore from this for free but it's a pretty nominal fee but a lot of times you can just like ping their support and just say like look I messed up really bad can you bail me out is there anything that you have relating to my site so a lot of times they can you know assist you there but like I said this is the smartest thing that you can do for your site is just get some kind of backup system in place and that is it and I'm happy this is just because I don't like public speaking so this is what's happening in my brain right now there's balloons and confetti but I'm happy to answer any questions and I'm also going to be in the community support lounge today at one as long as my cold doesn't take me down for the count before then so I am more than happy to field troubleshooting questions there as well if you're using a third party backup plugin do I what? well I think that probably like the recommended schedule kind of depends on how often you are updating your site like if you have a blog site and you add a new post like every week then you know weekly backups are fine if you're changing something a lot you know daily backups are probably a good idea and like vault press the thing that I use does do daily backups and I think they keep like 30 days of backups I really like daily backups even though I am horrible about blogging and I don't actually update my own site very often but I still like the daily backup thing but it probably just depends on kind of how often you know you're changing content or your client's changing content or that kind of thing does anybody else have any questions? they're getting excessive spam are you worried about the site? sure I mean I feel like that those are two separate questions so I'll address them in two different ways so WordPress sites do a lot of times you do get a lot of spam if you have like a form plugin or anything like that depending on what you're using on your WordPress site there's various ways that you can combat the spam like gravity forms for example they have like a honeypot field and I think that they also have you know you can on pretty much any form plugin you can do something like a CAPTCHA there are also plugins like I know gravity forms has something through it's called gravity perks and it's like a blacklist essentially you can add like words that you want blocked like any and I've actually found that to be super helpful because I'm like guess what I don't need to know about Viagra anymore about it again so those kinds of things are helpful about the what do I do if I think I've been hacked I'm gonna say their name wrong because everybody says security and I feel like I went to something and they said it's not security it's pronounced some other way but anyway it looks like it's pronounced security but it's a paid service and they can actually help fix your site I wouldn't if you've been hacked I would recommend investing in somebody that knows what they're doing to clean the hack just because odds are if you're trying to just you know kind of guess on how to fix it there's going to be like a backdoor or something like there's some kind of file that still exists there that's just going to create an ongoing problem for you so even if you're not using a service like that there are plenty of developers that do you know clean hack work but I would recommend kind of reaching out to a professional there I know security and I apologize in advance again I know that you pronounce it a different way they have a free scanner plugin also that you can put on your site that will flag it if like like a core file is changed or something so you can kind of get an idea there I will say with hacking I feel like that I haven't seen it very often on WordPress sites where everything is done right I feel like a lot of times it's because either plugins aren't being updated cores not being updated somebody decided the admin password is too hard and they changed it to one two three four five or something like that you know I feel like that there's always like making it easier for bad things to happen some things going on so I feel like that if you are keeping everything up to date and keeping secure passwords and you know there are various plugins out there that can boost security a bit there are like limit login attempts there are some where you can like ban certain IPs and that kind of thing I feel like that hacking kind of the likelihood of that happening you know is greatly reduced does anybody else have any questions are you talking about like if you're posting your own email address or something like that like a crawler or something there are certain people that do various things like there's javascript workarounds or something honestly I just put my email address on there and I feel like that I feel like form spam is more of a problem than like ending up on a mailing list because my email address is there so I personally don't like combat that by like spelling out my email address or doing some kind of like javascript workarounds so I personally don't have like a good tried and true this is what I would recommend method there a lot of times I just have my email and plain text just because I want people to talk to me anybody else I was going to say with that do you have a connection to a Gmail address or something that has really good spam handling it doesn't really matter and I use Google apps for my email and I recommend Google apps to everybody I think that Google apps has insanely great spam protection when I was using like a host a host based email address I was getting just bombed with spam and since I moved to Google it's going to be reduced so Google apps is a great option and you had a question do you have any experience with training like a maintenance kind of thing do you have any experience with that what you're thinking about you know a lot of the tasks that those kind of support companies do there are maintenance plans where the people come in and they update your plugins and they update core maybe it has so many hours a month I feel like it's kind of hard to say like I recommend this or I don't I think it's important that those things get done so if you don't feel comfortable updating your plugins or keeping WordPress core up to date then you need to find somebody that can do that for you because you're risking your entire site if you just let it sit there so I think that those services or you know any kind of like maintenance kind of contract with a developer that you have a relationship with I think that they're great because I don't think that WordPress sites are something that it's like you create it and your job is done I think they need regular attention and you need to be aware of what's happening behind the scenes to keep everything kind of running smoothly kind of like a car needs regular maintenance somebody have a question over here I personally have a dedicated virtual server with media pimple but I am probably moving to either WP Engine or Flywheel soon they both are now offering really great like developer plans I personally don't host client sites I know some developers too host client sites I feel like people get very panicky when their site is down so I don't have a sole freelancer fielding that desperation like when I'm on vacation or something like that is not something I want to do so I like people to have their own hosting plans I've worked with I've probably worked with every hosting company under the sun and just a lot of times clients are coming to me with their various hosts I think Flywheel is great I think WP Engine is great I think that there are a lot of like specialized WordPress hosts out there I think SiteGround has a pretty solid plan I would say with hosting it's very much like a you get what you pay for kind of thing if you are paying $3.95 a month and you're expecting your site to never have problems then I think that there's a disconnect there if you're paying for more bells and whistles and more dependability then you're going to get that so I would say invest in your host or recognize that because you're not investing you may be on an overloaded shared server or may experience more downtime or something like that so I really like specialized WordPress hosts I think they offer a lot of added benefits and I think there's a lot more competitors in the space now so I think that there's a plan with a price point out there for everybody now I like Flywheel and WP but everybody and you know everybody has their own hosting like preferred thing and especially if you're dealing with shared hosting you can have completely different experiences on the exact same host based on who you're sharing your resources with like if you're on a server with somebody who's abusing their resources you know and kind of slowing down the entire thing then you're going to think a host is bad quote unquote where somebody else may have zero problems because they're on a server that's not you know those problems aren't occurring on what host do you not recommend network solutions go daddy which I think is here I'm very sorry they're improving every day I will say that they've come a long way and I think that they're maybe not worth the they'll get a lot of developer hate for go daddy I feel like like I said they're really making an effort to kind of write the ship so I wouldn't say you know if you're hosted there you're in a world of trouble or anything but network solutions I personally cringe on and for some reason network solutions gets like people who are like I have a 30 year plan that I signed up for and you're like what like they have like committed to life for network solutions so you know Godspeed to those people does anybody have any other questions personally I actually I don't hate using go daddy for like domain registrations I actually like to keep my domain registrations separate from my hosting and that's just because I feel like moving is less of a pain it's a bit more separated out but I've jumped hosting companies at one time I was with post skater and I can't remember where I went before media temple but yeah like I said I feel like now I just I would like I think WP engine and flywheel are really great so that's why I'm looking forward to jumping to them I actually had great uptime with media temple so I was going to piggyback on that comment I used one in one and dream host reason why I switched over to dream host is because with Google downgrading your site for not having search SSL search and over dream host they offer free through that EFF program I don't want to name it right now thank you so I wanted to get over onto that and I noticed when I went over to them they said they had the best customer service I think they do they have great customer service but you know one-on-one while the customer service sucks I rarely need it sure but I used dream hosts customer service and it was great but I like not having to have customer service and that's not a glowing endorsement for one-on-one please don't take it that way I just mean to say it's not as simple sometimes as what you see right and and on that same point I do think that that knowing kind of how their support system works and you know is it just chat based do they have you know a phone number that you can call like how available are they to you is important when choosing a host like I think that WP engine has kind of a slight edge over flywheel in that area because their their support is a bit more responsive and flywheel they have a phone number that's I feel like that it's busy a lot or you leave a message a lot and then they have a ticket system whereas WP engine has like a live chat as well and they're a bit more easy to to reach but yeah when dealing with any hosting support I mean I say this whereas I have had plenty of arguments with hosting support people but I do feel like people sometimes come guns blazing at support people and you know they're not out to take your site down it wasn't their personal mission when they got out you know got out of bed that day so um I feel like having more of a friendly let's solve this together nature is always helpful when dealing with any kind of support issue across the board um anybody else awesome well thank you guys so much I hope that you can solve some problems on your WordPress site like I said I'll be in the community support lounge at one or you can find me before then and I'm happy to talk about any WordPress issues specifically that you have um yeah thank you