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“There has been critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.”
No email was received. I can’t find a way to get in touch with WordPress. I can’t find a phone number or anything. The site is paid up.
Help??
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Very vague start here:
You should get an email, or your admin should get an email with the WordPress error you received. You can also check your logs to see what is causing the error. Usually a plugin.
You need to access the server and files through your hosting. Don’t wait for the email, it only repeats the message. It doesn’t give you any more info.
There are loads of articles and info out there on how to go about fixing it, but you need access to the backend or at least ftp access
On the page that shows the error, there is a link to Learn more about debugging WordPress. If you follow that link it will attempt to walk you through some troubleshooting steps.
Looks like they don’t promote ssh or ftp under their features page so you’ll have to call ipage for support.
Hi OP:
I suspect that the email went to the admin account of the website, and depending on what was done when the website was set up WordPress may think the email is [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]). This is the default when using a tool such as softaculous to create a website. You likely don’t actually have such an email so you are left with nothing to help you.
In the majority of instances the reason for the critical error is related to a plugin, and to a lessor degree the theme in use on the website. After some updating, which may have occurred in the background if plugins are set to autoupdate, something failed causing the WSOD and your message.
**The Solution:**
Your website is hosted with someone. You have a control panel at your webhost for managing the website. In this control panel one sets up email, can access the database and among many other functions there is a “file manager”. The file manager is where you can actually view all the software files that make up your website. You need to use the file manager to access the website files.
When you enter the file manager you will initially be in what is called the “root”. It will be a list of folders and perhaps some files as well – none of which you will recognize but don’t worry about that. At this level the files and folders you are viewing mostly relate to the host’s repository control functions of the website.
Look for a folder called “public_html” or “home” these being the most common instances. I hope for ease it is one of those. Double click on it. It will bring you to the next level of the host container, and now you are viewing the folders and files that make up your wordpress website.
One of these folders is called “wp-content”. Double click on it. Now you are viewing all the content of the wp-content folder. It holds several more folders and a few discreet files. You will be looking at folders called “themes”, “plugins”, “uploads”, “update” and perhaps some others.
The next step is to rename the plugin folder. The consequence of doing this is that all plugins active in the website are going to be instantly deactivated. The benefit of this is that if it is a plugin which is causing the problem (you do not know which one yet) deactivating it should cease the error. The negative of doing this, although only a minor inconvenience, is that sometimes plugins which were connecting to a social media service or an ecommerce api or other external api’s sometimes have to be reconnected.
To rename the plugin folder right click right on the folder name, and a dialog box should pop up with options one of which is to rename it. Click on rename. just add to the name the word “parked” so that the new name is “pluginsparked”.
Now in a separate tab refresh the website. Likely it will come up. Assuming it did so you can go back now and change the name of the plugin folder back to “plugin”. Why can you do that? Because when you initially changed the name all the plugins were instantly deactivated and in fact by changing the name of the folder WordPress was unable to even see the website had plugins. When you change the name back to “plugins” WordPress can now find the plugin folder again but the plugins were deactivate in the steps above. They all have to be reactivated manually once you log into the website.
If the above did not fix your problem you have to surf to the themes folder and find the theme folder of the theme that was active in your website. Rename it to “themeparked”. This causes the website to revert to the WordPress default theme. I suppose I should add that you have to have at least one WordPress default theme in your website. If not you will need to upload it to this folder prior to renaming the active theme.
Assuming you can access the site now, rename the themefolder removing the “parked” from it. The theme is now available to the site again but it is not active.
The above resolves the error in 99.9% of the situations.
Now you have to start activating plugins one by one until you find the culprit.
BTW in the public_html root you will likely have a file called “error_log”. Were you to open it you would likely find the error in it which advises what caused the site to fail. I did not mention this at the outset as it sounds to me like even if you viewed it you would not understand it. But you could view it first as it would tell you which plugin or theme caused the issue and you would only have to deactivate that one item typically to restore your website.
Hope this helped.