There are a few things that can go wrong with wordpress pretty often. Most of them are simple to fix, and you may even be able to do them yourself. With the information below you should be able to fix your site, diagnose it or at the very least communicate better with your webdesigner.

The home page loads fine but when you try to click onto any other page, you get a 404 File Not Found error.

Usually this is due to a lost or miss-configured htaccess file. And more often than not, it happens right after you’ve moved the site from one host to another. Sounds scary, but it couldn’t possibly be easier to fix. Just log in to your wordpress admin section, go to Settings > Permalinks and click the Save Changes button. This will reset your htaccess file and you should be good to go.

You’re SURE you made a change, but the change isn’t showing up when you hit refresh.

Try holding down CTRL while you press the F5 button. This will clear the cache and do a full refresh.

Your shortcodes are showing.

Did you deactivate a plugin or change to a new theme? If so, that’s probably why. Otherwise, it could be a plugin conflict. You can try deactivating and reactivating plugins to see which one might be causing the problem, or just describe it to your web designer and he or she can look into it.

You see edit links and a dark grey admin bar across the top of your website.

This is normal. If you’ve logged in to the wordpress admin section then gone back to the front-end of the site, you will see the edit links and the admin bar. Your users won’t see it.

You got some HTML code from somewhere, pasted it into a page but when you view the page, you see the code.

Remove the code and look for a tab that says “Text” at the top-right of the content box when you’re editing the page. Click that tab and try pasting your code back into the page. After that, you can click the “Visual” tab to get back to the visual editor. Save your page.

The white screen of death!

The white screen of death is a common error and annoyingly difficult to diagnose because it can be caused by so many things. More often than not, it’s a plugin conflict. But can also be a theme that conflicts with an updated version of wordpress, a database issue, a badly configured php if statement or a host of other things. Something for your designer to check out. But what you can do to help is to tell him or her what, if anything, has changed on the site. Updates, additions, changes at your web host, anything.

If any of these don’t fix the problem, just contact your web designer (or me, if you don’t have one!) and describe the problem with as much detail as you can.