As one of the most widely used blog platforms online, wordpress has its fair share of errors you will run into at some point. Fortunately, many wordpress errors have simple fixes that can let you get on with managing a website. If you are a website owner running on the wordpress platform, it will help to know common errors that happen to everyone. This will avoid any temporary stressful situations. 

Before fixing any issues yourself, make sure you have a backup so you don’t lose any data. Additionally, reading these common fixes ahead of time will help you fix any common wordpress issue quickly in the future. 

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Most popularly, many websites built with wordpress can see the notice “Error establishing a database connection”. While this error may look like a big deal, the platform is just notifying you that it can not connect to the database. Usually, this is because of your database user credentials. If the database username or password is incorrect, this error will appear. To fix the issue, log into your file manager and update the wp-config.php file. If all the database privileges are allowed for the user, then everything should work just fine when the login details are correct.  

Once again, logins can create a lot of issues with wordpress. If you are unable to reset your admin password via email, you still have another option. You can login directly to the MySQL database using phpMYAdmin. Then, select the corresponding database and navigate to the wp-users table. Here, you can locate the admin user and change details such as the username, password and ID. This is a simple fix to gain access to your admin panel when you are unable to reset the password. Just remember, if you can’t login to wordpress, you can still give yourself access via the database.  

The notice “Internal Server Error” looks like wordpress is having a meltdown to most users. In actuality, this error happens pretty frequently. Most commonly, when moving a wordpress website between hosting companies, you may see this error. This error is can be caused by the .htaccess file rewrite rules. If you have custom permalinks enabled, then they need to be rewritten. You can easily fix this error by changing your wordpress permalinks settings back to default. Then, once again change it back to your /post-name/ or pretty permalinks option. In many cases, this will solve the scary internal server error problem.

Another common wordpress notice, the 403 Forbidden error means that you do not have permission to access a certain location on the website. This can happy for several reasons like incorrect file permissions or a conflicting wordpress plugin. Usually, you can solve this by deactivating all of the wordpress plugins to see if the issue is resolved. If resolved, you can start to reactive them one by one to identify which plugin is causing the issue. The most popular wordpress plugins which can be found here or here can conflict with each other. While reactivating the plugins, you should try to see if the combination of two specific plugin trigger the issue. Then, you can choose which plugin in more important to your site and find an alternative for the conflicting one.

When wordpress sites can’t handle the incoming traffic, you might see that the connection has timed out. You may see this issue when your site has been completely overloaded. This means too many people are requesting server resources which has reached its maximum allotted capacity. To fix this issue, you can simply talk to your hosting company to upgrade to a larger package. While this will cost you a bit more money per month, it’s a great sign that your website is growing and attracting more visitors. 

In order to manage a wordpress website successfully, you should familiarize yourself with these common errors. Sometimes, beginners will get scared at the sight of “Forbidden” or “Internal Server” notices. These are just regular errors that have simple fixes. Make sure that your database connection has the right login details. If you get locked out of admin, you can always recover via the database. Then, reset permalinks to fix an internal server error. Or, disable plugins when you see a 403 error. In the event your website gets overloaded, it might be time to upgrade your hosting package to handle all of your traffic. Knowing these common wordpress errors and fixes, you will be well prepared to manage your site in the future.