249 - 'U' is for Undo

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Hello, it’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today is for U  for Undo…

Preamble

This is about common WordPress mistakes and how to get out of a pickle if things go wrong. With all the plugins, themes and community work in WordPress, it’s often surprising that any of it hangs together, and that WordPress websites even work at all… (even more so since the Gutenberg Project says David!). Yet, despite that, neither of us have really had any issues over the years. How can this be?

There’s certainly plenty of scope for things to go wrong on your WordPress website, and to go wrong badly, and that’s the subject of the podcast today. What can go wrong and how might you recover…

The stuff that goes wrong

Here’s some articles to kick us off. They explain some of the things that often go wrong with WordPress websites and how things might be fixed:

https://www.wpbeginner.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/

https://wordpress.org/support/article/common-wordpress-errors/

It boils down to this list, which we discuss in the podcast:

• Most Page Builders have an undo
• Changes not showing. Caching issue. (Ctrl +F5, disable –  caching on browser – use incognito/private mode)
• Losing styling changing themes (https://wordpress.org/plugins/customizer-export-import)
• WordPress not sending email – (https://wordpress.org/plugins/fluent-smtp/ – has SMTP and catches emails)
• Stuck in maintenance mode – FTP delete the maintenance file in the root
• White screen of death – recovery mode
• Log-in redirect loop – (https://www.hostinger.co.uk/tutorials/fix-wordpress-login-redirect-loop)
• Fatal error – memory – hosting or not defining enough ram (often needed with Page Builders)
• 404 – refresh permalinks
• Blog page or post not showing correctly – having the same URL
• Hacked sites (talked about this next time) but scanning with WordFence
• Server going down

Good practice

Here’s some good ideas for preventing you needing to ever have to undo in the first place:

• Check WordPress hosting requirements – https://en-gb.wordpress.org/about/requirements/ – allow for the required server power
• Check WordPress revisions
• Using a child theme (https://wordpress.org/plugins/customizer-export-import)
• Look for plugin settings that allow you to remove database entries
• Check console for errors
• Uptime monitoring
• Disabling XML-RPC

Cool Stuff

https://wpreset.com/ – a plugin which allows you to just start all over again!

Longer term issue prevention

• Doing due diligence on plugins and authors
• Backups on a 3rd party server
• Backups on your local machine
• Not over doing it with (heavy) plugins

So there you have it. A list of things that you never want to experience. What a great podcast! If you agree, or disagree, reach out in the comments below or in the WP Builds Facebook Group.