Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin. I’m excited to be here with you, just like I am every single week, because today we’re going to talk about how to troubleshoot a broken WordPress site. This happens all the time, whether it be your site is down for a specific reason or your host site goes down or whatever the reason is, we’re going to dive into this and kind of explore it so we can know the steps to troubleshoot how we can figure out what type of issue we may be having with our website and with our why it’s down and why it’s not working. I want to let you know there are tons of announcements we’re going to go through today, but very first before we even get that started I’m going to let you know that this episode is sponsored by Dream Press 2. It’s a new hosting solution by Dream Host, and I’ll spend some more time talking about some of the cool things about Dream Press a bit later in the show, so stay tuned for that. First off, I want to let you know about the WordPress webinar for August. It’ll be happening August 7th at 10:00 a.m. Eastern, and we’ll be talking about the must have plugins for your WordPress website.

This is actually going to be the presentation that had just recently done at The Podcast Movement and we’re going to just redo it. So if you’re unable to travel to Dallas for The Podcast Movement, you can register over at yourwebsiteengineer.com, sign up for the webinar replay, or sign up for the webinar, and then you’ll get a replay later in the day even if you can’t come. So you can do that, yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar. Also I’d like to let you know that I will be traveling to Dallas Fort Worth area for The Podcast Movement, and I’ll be speaking on August 2nd, and I will be talking about the must have plugins for WordPress podcasters. We’ll spin this just a little bit just to really kind of highlight the plugins that are necessary for most bloggers or website owners. That’s’ what the webinar will be about, but that’s what I’ll be speaking about at The Podcast Movement. If you’re coming to Dallas, if you’re going to be there for The Podcast Movement, please let me know. I want to meet you in person, I want to say hi, and if you are there you can find me in a bright orange shirt just like I always do when I am out speaking and going to events like that.

Okay, I want to let you know about Jet Pack 3.6. This was actually in the show for last week but when I recorded it I said WordPress 3.6 and it was very confusing and it didn’t make any sense because I had just talked about the WordPress 4.3 beta, and all these numbers in my head were just kind of confusing, so I just cut the whole section out and I decided just to replay it, or I’ll talk about this announcement this week in this show. So WordPress, or, see, I almost did it again, Jet Pack 3.6 actually was updated last week, July 6th, was when it came out, and it updated social widgets, Jet Pack CLI, and much more. But one of the cool things that came with this update is now there’s extra sidebar widgets, so now there is a social media icon widget where you can just put in your username and it spits out all the little logos and the graphics for the different networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, GitHub, Vimeo, and YouTube, so those are the ones that are built in, and they also updated the Facebook “like” box, or the “like” box widget to make sure that that is all set up to be displaying absolutely perfect on your Jet Pack enabled sites. It also does things for the Jet Pack CLI, which is the command line interface, which allows you to turn on and turn off modules within Jet Pack itself. So that’s really cool, and then lastly they have a new Jet Pack connection management, which this basically will take you to a configuration page where you can manage your site’s primary user, you can see other connected users and manage your connection with WordPress.com. That’s kind of all in the new management panel so you can find that in the My Jet Pack area of Jet Pack.

There are a few other things that ended up, they’ve added the feature image to gallery post information for pages and posts within the mobile theme and now they also have the ability to enter a captcha, add a captcha on the login flow so in case you want to make sure that people can’t automatically sign up for your site, then you can turn on the captcha as well. Another thing that came out in the news is Video Press is now updated as well. This came out, it’s a brand new system and it is powered more, Video Press is a service by Automatic and WordPress.com that’s powered more than three billion video plays on WordPress.com over the last few years, and it also can be used on Jet Pack hosted sites as well. Now it does cost $60.00 per year to unlock the feature and let it start working, but it basically is, kind of think of it as like a Wistia or even a YouTube or Vimeo, like you can upload your content directly into WordPress and then you can play it straight from there. It’s a brand new responsive player. It looks really good. There’s a link in the show notes to the blog article that talks about it. This was released earlier this month, and speed improvements are really good. It looks great. It looks great on mobile and it looks great on your computer, so definitely want to check that out if you’re interested in a place for hosting your videos for your website.

And then the last piece of news is WordPress 4.3 beta two is now available, and so I talked about some of this a couple of weeks ago or maybe even last week that some of the cool things that are happening with the beta is they’re bringing the menus to the customizer, and the customizer just makes it feel like it’s part of WordPress. Like right now if you try to go and configure a menu, like, it’s in the under appearance and then it’s to menus, and then you have to drag and drop and then you have to save and then you have to go and look at your site, “Is that right?” And then you have to go back. With the customizer, everything is live previewed, so when you go ahead and add a new menu, it will automatically show up, and it’s really really cool. Another thing that you can do in the header area is you can add an icon for your site, so this will mean that if you want to have the little icon that shows up on the web browser, like the fav icon it’s called, that is now found in the customizer as well, and that needs to be a 512 square pixel, and then it shrinks it down to the appropriate size for the different things that it’s used for. That image also appears when you head on over to WordPress.com/sites and you can see all of your sites, either WordPress.com sites or Jet Pack enabled sites, and then that little image is what appears on that page as well.

So there’s a lot of other fixes that are out there. They made almost 100 changes since beta one, and so if you’re interested in checking that out, go ahead and install that on a local server somewhere so you can play with it and see, and I really think the menu part came out really good. It looks great and it just works. It’s really really cool. So those are all of the announcements today. So there is stuff that’s happening on all fronts within WordPress. We got a new beta, we’ve got Jet Pack with a new version, and we’ve got Video Press which is a great new technology to display videos on a website. Now, you do get to see the stats for Video Press. You can look at those within your WordPress dashboard, but it’s not nearly as in depth as the tools that Wistia or different places to host your site. So depending on what your cost is and what you’re looking to do, it may be a good option for you. I know that I like using Video Press for stuff that I don’t really need a lot of stats for and I don’t want to pay extra to have them hosted at Wistia and I want kind of them private so they’re not on YouTube or Vimeo. So that’s what I use Video Press for. And today’s is There A Plugin for That section, I wanted to tell you about a plugin that is a very high niche plugin. It is one that just kind of really highlights how simplistic WordPress can be and how complex it can be and just the plugin is called Automatic Copyright Year, and it is a plugin that just recently came out.

It has less than 10 active installs, so this isn’t a highly highly sought after plugin, but what it does is it adds your copyright year to some sort of sidebar or widget within your footer, and so basically what you can do is you put a shortcode in the widget and it automatically displays whatever calendar year it is. Now this is super helpful if you always want to make sure that the copyright date stays current and if it’s not programmed into your theme you can just go ahead and install this plugin called Automatic Copyright Year. And it’s very simple. It scratches a need that somebody wanted to fix, they created the plugin, added it to the plugin repository, and it is one of the over 38,000 that are in the repository. So if you’re looking for something to display that copyright year at the bottom of your website, definitely check out that plugin for sure. All right, so now let’s move on over to the main section of the show where we’re going to talk about how to troubleshoot our WordPress site. Because sometimes our WordPress sites get broken. Sometimes you log in and it’s broken and your site isn’t displaying or maybe you can’t log in or maybe you have the white screen of death. Maybe you have, all of these different things could happen and could be going on and I just wanted to kind of talk through today some of the things that can break, some of the ways to troubleshoot these broken issues so we can make sure that we get our sites back up and running as soon as possible.

Now I want to make a side note as soon as we get started that if you are running a WordPress.com site, then most of these things won’t actually happen. Your website is not going to go down, you’re not going to accidentally edit some file that’s going to break things, a plugin is not going to break things, because all of that is controlled in the WordPress.com environment, and so you will never have that issue. But these are mostly things that will happen to a self-hosted website. So let’s dive in and take a look. So the first thing I just want to highlight some of the things that can break. So you could have database connection issues. You could have theme conflicts. You could have plugin conflicts. You could get the white screen of death. Maybe you won’t be able to log into your site. Maybe pages aren’t displaying properly or maybe the homepage works but then the rest of the pages don’t work. So those are all the things that could happen and I’m sure there’s hundreds more things.

Maybe your side bar, instead of displaying on the right hand side is now at the bottom of the page. You know, it’s kind of in a wonky format. All of these things could happen to your WordPress site. So for maximum success in troubleshooting, it’s great to have FTP and database access, so you can make sure that you can get to things, but then I also highly recommend working on a local version on your machine. I’ve talked about this in the past. My favorite company to do that is Desktop Server, or my favorite program I guess. The company is Server Press, but the actual software is called Desktop Server, and you can find out more at yourwebsiteengineer.com/desktopserver, and that will take you right to the landing page there. And so I always like to do things locally so that way in case things break I can fix them and it’s not affecting my main site. But then on the other hand, if you are working on your main site and it breaks, you have to fix it right away. So having a local site isn’t really going to help things because you need to get that main site up and running as quickly as possible. So the troubleshooting basics starts like this. You go to your site and it doesn’t work. And so the first thing you think about is, okay, step one is what did you just do? Take a little bit of time and just figure out, okay; what was the thing that just happened immediately before what I did?

Are you getting some sort of error message when you refresh the page? Are you not able to log in? You know, just think about what actually just happened. If you’re coming to your website for the very first time for the day or maybe it was working yesterday and then you came to do something else today and then you can’t get to your site, then it could be a problem with the database is down for your website. And so that could be one thing that that is the big one that says, “Error establishing database connection.” If you ever see that, it’s usually in black text and about the H1 font. It’s kind of large. If you see that when you refresh your site, that’s normally the database is doing some sort of, it’s either down or it’s doing a refresh or doing something and right now WordPress can’t connect to the database, so it can’t serve any information, and that’s normally a hosting issue. So if that happens, what happens is most of the time you just have to contact your hosting provider and see what may be taking place and see how they can help you to resolve that. This is a great opportunity to just discuss a little bit about having the Jet Pack monitor enabled, so that’s a module within Jet Pack that basically will send you an email anytime that your website is down. So it constantly just goes and pings your website to make sure that it sees your site and then if it gets that “error establishing connection” or no site at all, it’s going to send you an email and you’re going to know right away, then you can contact your hosting provider and they can help you get things back up and running and get things online and back up and working.

So the first thing, like I said, you want to think about what did you just do? If it was working and then you did something and now it’s broken, then that’s most likely something that you just did. So think about what just happened, what did I just do? Did I change themes? Did I update a widget? Did I activate plugins? Whatever the case may be, just think about that. Troubleshooting step number two is normally deactivate all plugins. That’s what the hosting company is going to tell you first. That’s what people that are going to try to help you with WordPress are going to tell you. Deactivate all the plugins and see if your site still works. We want to make sure that it’s not a plugin that’s conflicting with another plugin. Maybe you just updated a plugin and now your site went all haywire, and so it could be that that plugin is, you know, there was one plugin, the new one, that is causing some sort of conflict within your site. So what do you do? You deactivate them all, and then you start turning them on one at a time, and then you check the first one and the second one. Okay, do those two work together? And then you try one two and three, and then do those ones work together? And then eventually you’ll find when you activate one of them your site is broken. And then you try toggling them and you figure out you can at least diagnose what plugin is the issue and then once you decide that, then you can either go to the plugin developer, or you can try to do some research on why that specific plugin is breaking your site, or maybe they’ll have some conflicts on their website, like, “This plugin, this version now conflicts with this plugin in this version,” and then you can know which one it is.

And so that’s a great step to know and to go through. So find what plugin may be causing the issue. Another troubleshooting step is change to the default theme. So this is another step if you are doing some theme modifications or maybe you’re trying to get some styling to work right or maybe something is just goofy. And nothing is happening with the plugins, you’ve tried turning them all off, you’ve turned them all back on, and the issue still persists. And then what you want to do is you want to change to your default theme. You want to do this kind of in a quick manner because if you do change to a 2013, 2012, 2014, 2015, whatever type of theme, as soon as you change to it, everybody in the world will be able to see that as your website and it’s going to not look very good. So what you want to do is you want to change to a default theme, you want to check to see if that issue is still happening. If it is, then you know that it’s not a theme related thing. If it’s not happening then you know it’s probably something in the theme, so then you can start troubleshooting down the path of, “Okay, what’s the issue inside the theme?” Troubleshooting step number four is to try flushing the cache, or maybe try on another device. Sometimes your website actually gets cached. I know that Go Daddy is a big one for this with their web hosting. I know, they may have changed it in the last couple of years, but when I first got into working with WordPress and doing things, making changes to CSS and different things, I would make a change, I would hit save, I would refresh, and nothing would happen.

And I’m like, “Did I use the wrong class? Did I use the wrong selector? What is going on?” It didn’t update, and then it just turned out that Go Daddy had a version of the website cached and then it updated the cache every few minutes or something. It was crazy and it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, so I kept trying different things and it wasn’t actually updating and so what you can do is try flushing the cache. Try a different device, if you’ve never pulled up your website on a different device or in a different browser or on a different computer. Whatever it is, it’s going to load it like it’s loading for the very first time. It’s going to pull in all the resources and it’s not going to use a cache version of your site. So that’s another one to think about when you are trying to troubleshoot and trying to figure out what could be going wrong with your website. Troubleshooting step number five is head on over to the forums. You might be able to find something in the forums. I like to just go to Google WordPress and then whatever type of issue that I’m having and that normally, the number one, two, and three results normally are to the WordPress forum, or you can just head on over to WordPress.org/support and post what’s going on or, I like to do a little research first just to make sure that I’m probably not the first person that’s had this problem, and even if some of the posts are 10 years old. Okay, they’re not 10, but even if they’re five years old, a lot of times those actually help. I had just an issue last week that I was having problems; it said that the media file wasn’t writeable, and then it turned out that an older post pointed me to the media area on the dev site and it worked out perfectly fine and it started working. Like, it was crazy that an old post like that helped me and it was just awesome.

So that’s another thing you can do is head on over to the forums. Troubleshooting step number six is once you kind of have figured out all of this information, okay, it’s not a plugin, it’s not a theme thing, maybe it’s – it’s not this, it’s not that, you know, I’ve flushed my cache, I’ve looked at the forums, there’s nothing on the forums, then this might be a good time to reach out to your hosting provider, and this would be perfect if you’re using a solution that is a WordPress specific hosting platform, kind of like Dream Press 2 is. You could take that opportunity to contact them, and they’re WordPress experts. They work with WordPress every single day and it may be something very very simple that is just a small little thing, it’s a checkbox somewhere that needs to be updated or your permanent links need to be reset or whatever it is, it’s something that they may have seen before and they can just recommend, here’s the fix and here’s the change and that’s all it needs to do. So that’s another thing that you can do. One other point that I want to make is I mentioned at the top of the show about sometimes your website is off balance, so maybe if your side bar is supposed to be on the right hand side, now it’s underneath all the content and it just looks kind of wonky. That normally is just, this is something that I’ve just learned over the years, that’s normally a missing some sort of tag.

And so whether you open up a div tag or a span tag or things along those lines, if you have an unclosed tag somewhere, specifically a div tag, then that’s going to lead to that unbalancedness of a website. So you want to make sure that you’re just going in, you’re looking for matches for opening and closing div tags and then that normally fixes that issue as well. And when all else fails, if you have no idea where else to go, then you can head on over to a page on the WordPress codecs and it’s got FAQ_troubleshooting, there’s a link in the show notes for episode number 241 that kind of highlights and steps you through the different areas, the different places where you can go to find more information about how to troubleshoot, what you’re looking for, and things along those lines. So those are the different steps, the troubleshooting steps and techniques. It does take a little bit of time to try to figure out. You want to initially just diagnose the problem and try to figure out what’s causing the issue. If you can figure out what’s causing the issue then most of the time you can either undo a previous update or you can at least troubleshoot and you can at least ask the right type of questions, because it’s really difficult, especially with WordPress.com support, when I get emails when people are asking, “My site is broken,” that’s not helpful at all. And then when I get a message like that, then I have to reply and I have to ask follow up questions and that just delays the time that the website is not working as expected and it just kind of slows down that support process. So if you know where the problem is, if you can kind of diagnose, you think it’s a theme related thing, you think it’s a plugin thing, you think there’s some sort of weird CSS stuff going on, then if you’re in that right area then that’s going to be the best when you reach out for help either on the forums or with your hosting provider or something along those lines.

So that’s kind of what I wanted to share today. I hadn’t shared that in an episode at least as far as I could tell, as far as I could scroll back and kind of look through all my recent posts within the last 240 episodes, so I thought this would be a good time to talk about it and it’s a good time too now to talk a little bit about Dream Press 2 and this is a faster, more powerful managed WordPress hosting. It is very similar to the Fly Wheel hosting. It’s also very similar to WP Engine, in the fact that it is a managed WordPress site that you don’t have to install WordPress, and then they keep things updated, they keep things running, and it is running on a virtual private server so those are VPSes, and it’s super-fast, highly reliable, and I’m really excited about it even though there’s all kinds of specs within it that make zero sense to me because I don’t know anything about servers. But some of the things that I know that you’ll understand are there’s 30 gigs of SSD storage that you get with every Dream Press 2 account. You also have the ability to have up to 2.1 million monthly visitors and your website will never go down, and it automatically installs WordPress and keeps you up and running and you get unlimited email addresses, which is really nice.

That doesn’t happen a lot with WordPress hosting companies. Sometimes you get one or two or sometimes you have to pay an extra $5.00 per email account. You get unlimited email addresses and you get 24/7 WordPress support, so these are WordPress experts that work at Dream Host and they are there for you to answer any questions that you may have. Now you may or may not know this, and I don’t know if I’ve ever said this before, but Dream Host was actually my very first webhost. This was one that I started back in college and I started it and for some reason once I got started with it then I decided to move to another host because I liked the cPanel view better. Now that I’m back, I’ve got an account set up with Dream Host and Dream Press, I really like the dashboard within the Dream Host panel. So that’s really really cool. They have the ability inside the dashboard that you can see the, I actually have two VPSes. One VPS runs my website and one VPS runs my SQL database, which is awesome, and then I can go in and I can restart either of those if I need to and I can go in and actually go into the accounts right from there. So that’s all I wanted to share about Dream Press 2 and Dream Host but if you are interested, head on over to dreamhost.com and you can look and you can find Word Press hosting. It starts at $14.95 per month, and that’s a 40 percent savings, and so there’ll be a link in the show notes where you can get that and you can sign up and you can learn more information about Dream Host.

That is all that I wanted to share with you today. I know that things come up and I know that your website probably will go down at some point, but the thing is, if it happens, make sure that you find out as much as you can before you start contacting somebody, because that’s just going to speed up the process. If you have to contact support, give them as much information as you possibly can, and then that’s going to help the technicians or whoever, the people on the forum threads, help you that much faster. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care, and we’ll talk again next week.