3 Most Common WordPress Issues and How to Work Around Them
“Master online branding. Online branding makes you known for something specific by people who have not even seen you physically, before.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Inspirational Writer and Blogger
The value of personal branding and online presence can’t be underestimated. Any student startup be it an online education company or a writing service should have an identity. And so, it is important to master the basics of marketing as early as possible. Even small college projects can become hugely successful due to a sound marketing strategy.
The marketing competition is fierce and seems like there is nothing new on this planet that hasn’t been exploited for sales purposes.
One thing remains unchanged – WordPress still powers up most content marketing initiatives. This content management system is still widely used by solo bloggers and marketers of big companies. And thanks to its free of charge and open-source nature, it’s been getting more and more fans since 2003.
But, as a rule, big technological advances (especially ones that are free of charge) are accompanied by a bunch of bugs and errors. And this post will teach you how to leverage all the benefits of this popular solution by fixing typical issues like:
WordPress Issue #1: 404 Error
Another name for this error is “Page not Found”. This message can appear when a user is trying to visit a specific post or page on the site. But something goes wrong and they land on the page with this error.
It can happen because this blog post or page has been removed and the redirection to the live page hasn’t been set up. However, there can be other reasons for this.
Similar to other issues ranging from 400 to 499, 404 error is related to HTTP client error. It means that there is a conflict between the client’s browser and your site’s server.
There are two main reasons why the connection can be broken. The first one is that you have a problem with your permalink and its settings should be reconfigured.
The second is that you could possibly delete your .htaccess file, or an error appeared with the rewrite rules.
How to fix it:
To solve 404 error in WordPress you need to start with its permalink settings and follow these steps:
- Go to the “Settings” tab in your dashboard area
- Click on “Permalinks”
- Click the “Save Changes” button.
This resets the rewrite rules for your website and refreshes your permalink settings. Usually, it’s enough to fix the 404 error. If it doesn’t work, you can go another way and refresh the .htaccess file.
WordPress Issue #2: Connection Timed out/This Site Can’t Be Reached Error
“ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT” message in WordPress appears when your site has problems with connecting to your server. It’s a frequent issue of the websites operating on shared hosting.
The primary causes of this error are:
- You use too many plug-ins that consume too much memory
- Your custom theme doesn’t work with some of your plug-ins or a PHP version
- You need to purge cache
- The PHP memory is exhausted
How to fix it:
One of the best ideas to begin with, is to deactivate your plug-ins one by one. Once you have deactivated an app, try to get access to your site. By this simple elimination process, you can odd-one-out the most resource-hungry plug-in and substitute it with a more WordPress-friendly one.
If the root of all miseries is your theme – change it to a less over-engineered one.
Another tip is to extend your memory limits in PHP and clean your cache regularly.
If all these attempts fail and you still see the error message, it’s better to reach out to your hosting provider and seek their help.
WordPress Issue #3: Problems with Adding Images and PDF Files to Media Library
It’s a rather common issue in WordPress when you upload an image, but you can’t see it in the Media Library. Or there is no preview of this image. The possible reason for this is cached memory. To check if it’s true for your case, open a New Incognito Window in the Chrome browser.
You can change a browsing mode by using a keyboard shortcut: CTRL+Shift+N in Windows, and Command+Shift+N in Mac. Then try to perform a similar manipulation via the Incognito page.
If you no longer have this problem with uploading, then your solution is plain simple. You need to do the following:
- Purge cache (if you use any solution like Cloudflare)
- Clean your browsing history
- Hard reload the page by entering a shortcut CTRL+Shift+R
- Log in to WordPress admin panel
If your problem is of another nature and you see an error message like:
“Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/2021/11. Is its parent directory writable by the server?”, it’s time to deal with your file permissions.
Another symptom of this issue is that your images start to disappear from the WordPress media library.
How to fix it:
Your recovery procedure will look like this:
- Begin with connecting to your site via FTP,
- Go to your /wp-content/ folder where you’ll find the uploads folder with stored media files,
- Right-click the uploads folder
- Select “File Permissions” and bring up the file permissions dialogue popup.
- Set the permissions for your uploads directory and all subdirectories inside it to 744.
- Check the box next to “Recurse into subdirectories”
- Select the ‘Apply to directories only’ option.
- Click “OK” to set off the changes,
- Right-click on the uploads directory,
- Select “File permissions”,
- Change the numeric value to 644 in the dialogue box.
Final Words
WordPress is a wonderful tool both for newbies and experienced marketers. It’s manageable, free, and suitable for any industry. But like any other technology on the market, it’s not perfect and has its own issues.
However, these problems can be easily corrected if you have troubleshooting guides from WordPress itself or tutorials from proficient users. Moreover, you may always ask a friendly WordPress community of other fellow users or simply browse the community threads with tips if you need the answer asap.
There you can even get a quick response from the WordPress support team that can speed up the issue resolution. Thanks to global connectivity, system errors are no longer a catastrophe. But, anyway, may the error-free tech force be with you!
