Transcript:
Recently had someone reach out on Tik Tok uh asking me about how to fix their website that was broken there’s something wrong with their WordPress website and they had watched one of my other videos where I was talking about how to problem solve when your WordPress website breaks and one of the first steps to do is to go and turn off all the plugins in your hosting in your file manager area so this person had already done that and they’re still facing the same issues so I trouble I did a little troubleshooting with them and went through the steps and I want to make a video about it because you might find yourself in the same uh unfortunate place with your WordPress website and also this is going to be a PSA about what you definitely need to have in place which this person did not have that can solve this problem because ultimately when it comes to WordPress it’s a complicated technology it’s a it’s called a text stack it has four different layers of Technology all built on top of each other and so there’s a lot of different things that can go wrong plus you’re using plugins from a lot of different developers and then the main theme updates and sometimes the plugins and the theme no longer work together with each other with with the core so anyways it’s complicated it’s a complicated system so with complicated systems they can sometimes break so if you haven’t watched that other video I’ll just give you a little overview one of the first steps to do when you’re facing like a database error connection or you’re facing uh the website’s actually down you go into your file manager of your hosting and you go to the plugins and you rename the plugins so you just have to put like a one or some something in the plugin so it’s no longer the same name that’ll break the connection to the database and basically disable the plugin if you can’t get access to the back end of the website if you can get access to the back in the website you can go in and just uh deactivate the plugins manually that way that’s a quicker way to do it but if you can’t get access sometimes the whole site is down you can’t get into the back end you need to go access to the hosting and you need to rename the plugins go down and put a one just click on the plugin and click on it to the name of it and add like a one at the end and then and then save out of that so it’ll now have a one on it and do that to all the plugins that’ll disable the connection so they’re no longer active and then you go refresh the website and see if it was one of the plugins that was broken and that’s what was causing in the website to have an issue so in this person’s case it that didn’t solve the problem they already followed my instructions on that and they reached out to me saying I followed that uh video but it still didn’t fix the problem so here’s what what we need to do in that case because sometimes you have a real problem where it’s not the plugins it’s could be the core it could be a hack it could be something else going on and what you need in that situation uh is backups in place and I asked this person if they have backups they don’t have backups um and that’s a real problem so if you’re running WordPress and you don’t have backups this is a PSA that you do need to get backups immediately you should have backups done at the actual host company that you’re hosting with so if it’s a GoDaddy a HostGator blue host any place you’re hosting your website at go talk to them right away and ask them to purchase the backup plan could be like you know an additional 20 bucks a year or something like that it’s not going to be crazy expensive but you do need that in place um don’t rely on a plug-in on your website to do your backups because you know like I just explained through this whole video if your website’s broken and down you don’t have access to that plugin like what good did it do and plus it just takes up a lot of resources it’s better to make the have the resources on the actual host let them use the resources rather than have your website have the resources of doing backups so that’s a better way to do it it’s more reliable and it allows your website to run smoother so that’s really important one little thing that I offered him as uh something he can try because it is really an unfortunate situation there’s just not much you can do is to go to the theme so if you can get into the back end go to appearance and then go to themes it should be the first option and switch from your whatever the the theme that you’re currently in to the default WordPress theme so switch it over and the default is going to be whatever the year is usually if you have it installed so like you know WordPress 2024 maybe you have 2023 it’s there’s usually always a default theme installed if not you need to have that default theme installed switch over to that and then refresh the website and see if that loads so that’ll give you if it does load that’ll give you an indication that the issue is with the theme itself and so you may need to update the theme you might need to talk reach out to the developer of the theme and ask them what’s going on maybe there’s a bug with it right now so that’ll at least allow you to know that you have a problem with the theme and not with a core core files and things like that but ultimately if you find yourself in the situation one of the things that can always save you is having backups in place you know we have 30 days of backups with all the hosting we offer with our company so if this ever does happen and it’s very rare because we have a lot of things in place to prevent it from happening um you can always roll back the website to any save date within the last 30 days so that’s super super helpful so if you need help with your posting or your WordPress websites having issues it’s broken you can’t get into the back end or showing some really weird displaying of error messages or even a foreign language is coming up on your homepage definitely reach out to me I can help you I’m an expert in WordPress I’ve been working on it since 2008 uh so many many many years and I’ve fixed all kinds of problems every pretty much every imaginable WordPress problem you can think of I’ve come across it and I fixed it so I’d love to help you out if you need help Joe with sky Point Studios thank you so much for watching my videos and I’ll catch you in the next one.
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