Was talking to someone earlier who asked me to look at their site, because it keeps displaying an error message message. Tried logging into the site, but it's also showing the same thing when in dashboard. Only thing I can see besides that is the admin bar at the top, which doesn't allow me to go anywhere either.
The site must have been like this for a while, because the backups are two months old, and they all return the same message.
What I've gathered so far: It's some kind of a discontinued theme from ThemeForest, has WPBakery, WordFence, and a few other plugins like EWWW image compression, Limit Logins, and a few others. The plugins, except for WPBakery, which is very outdated, are set to auto update, and so is WordPress itself. The popular free plugins are all up to date, and WordPress is 6.6.1. The site itself runs on PHP 7.4.
I tried restoring the oldest backup, deleting security plugins, and resetting .htaccess with no luck.
I suspect that the theme is plain old, along with WPBakery, and at some point into WordPress 6.5+ update, it broke everything. It's not a big site, so it wouldn't take more than 3-5 hours to rebuild from scratch, though I'm trying to see if there's some way to save it instead or remaking it. Any advice on what else I could try?
This points to an issue with URL rewrites (permalinks), but you suggested that you had reset htaccess, which is strange.
Did you try resaving permalink structure from within the WP admin panel?
Potential other causes may be permissions, or just a plain old bad plugin or theme.
It might be due to php settings / JS errors / plugin conflict.
Resave your permalinks so that base is covered.
That error doesn’t even look like a WP screen.
Old themes, plugins, WP and PHP is a recipe for disaster – WP requires you to keep everything updated, otherwise you’ll get hacked or you’ll have problems like what you’re seeing now.
It sounds like WP isn’t even installed, if you can’t get to the admin screen. You can try installing a new copy of WP – download the zip from [wordpress.com](https://wordpress.com) and manually install it over the top of your existing site. You need SFTP, cpanel or SSH access to do that.