“I just upgraded WordPress and now my website doesn’t work. There’s just a blank page showing. How do I fix it?”
ANSWER:
Sometimes when doing a WordPress upgrade, things happen. Your website might break for a number of reasons:
- You’re not using the right PHP version.
- Plugins using certain PHP libraries clash and won’t work with each other.
- Something failed with the upgrade process – either with the files or with the database.
- Some other problem.
There are a number of things you can do to try to get things working again. Your last option is to restore from backup but when you do that, you’ll still have a version of WordPress that’s not up to date, so you can’t leave your website in that state (it could get compromised/hacked). Your best option is to proceed with the upgrade and try to fix what the problem is.
Here are some things to try:
- Disable all plugins.
- Remove plugins not being used.
- Re-install WordPress (FTP in and transfer the files as you may not have access to the Dashboard).
- Check your configuration file.
- Check the version of PHP being used. You may need to be using a higher version number (later version).
- Ask your website host for help.
- Run a “repair” command on the database tables.
- Check file permissions.
- Look at error_log files and see what message is showing there and then Google that exact error to see what others did to try to fix it.
If the items listed above don’t work or if it’s something that you have no idea what to do, then contact our support team and we’ll get you a quote. It may be something really simple.
-Tony