Wordpress Troubleshooting: When Your Blog Breaks Down
August 24th, 2009
Wordpress blog stopped working? It’s probably a bad plugin. If your Wordpress blog was working fine and now there’s something functionally wrong, it is almost surely the fault of a plugin, theme, or page template you have recently installed. This is particularly true when bloggers experience problems with Internet Explorer (IE). If you use a browser like Firefox or Opera, you may not realize something is wrong until you try to open your blog in IE.
Yikes!
So, what do you do when you discover a sudden blog malfunction? First, you do NOT panic. If the last thing you installed was a new Wordpress theme, uninstall it immediately (either with the “Appearance” tab in the dashboard or by removing it via FTP). If you have not recently installed a new theme, consider the plugins that you have recently installed. Unfortunately, not all coders are created equal, so not all plugins work like they are supposed to. Even if you have successfully installed a plugin, that does not meant that it can’t contain faulty or malfunctioning code.
Therefore, as a general rule, when you have a functionality problem with your blog, move backwards deactivating the most recently installed plugins one by one. Refresh your blog after each deactivation to see if you have found the culprit. If you are experiencing a browser cross-compatibility problem that you did not have before, you may have to remove all of your plugins and add them again one by one if removing them in backwards order does not seem to solve the problem. If your blog is so broken that you cannot access your dashboard to deactivate the potentially bad plugin(s), you may have to remove it via FTP. Simply go to “wp-content/plugins” in your installation of Wordpress and remove the entire plugin file that way.
In the future, when you add a new plugin, test your blog in all browsers available to you (especially Internet Explorer) to make sure that everything continues to run smoothly.
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