You’ve updated WordPress and now your website is broken. You need to fix it. Fast.
The two most likely culprits are a broken preloaded plugin or a broken theme. Let’s look at how to fix both.
Broken Plugin
The quickest way to fix this is to go in with ftp or go to your webhosting file manager and rename the plugin directory to plugin.nw. Preloaded plugins sorted.
Broken Theme
Themes are trickier. You have to rename the active theme, then rename one of the default WordPress themes to the name of the broken active theme. For instance. Say I’m using the theme “Broken” – I rename “Broken” to “Broken.nw” I then rename “twentynineteen” to “Broken” I can now go into theme selection in my WordPress and choose a working theme. Now that everything is working I can rename “Broken” back to “twentynineteen” then “Broken.nw” to “Broken”
This happened to a client recently. They had selected a third party theme and a WordPress update broke everything. All they were getting was this critical error:
It turned out the theme that they had installed broke the latest version of WordPress. The convoluted instructions above for renaming the theme brought the site back online.
This is one of the reasons I have resorted to using the WordPress default themes and then customizing them myself. When you use a third party theme it relies on that third party to keep the theme updated. It adds a dependency over which you have no control. Personally I prefer to keep things as simple as possible.
To access your hosting file manager, you need to log into your hosting account, select cpanel, then look for file manager under the files section. I will update this post as I encounter and fix more WordPress problems.
In other news it’s great to see the Government give out the password security advice that I gave in my last blog post. Perhaps they were reading it 😂 Let’s hope everyone updates their systems to take this into account! There’s nothing more infuriating than a prescriptive password system telling you to use a capital letter. And a number. And a punctuation mark.