Message on WhatsAppCommon WordPress Problems and How to Fix Them
By Shariq Naqi, Phrloo — updated September 2026
Most WordPress problems come from one of three things: a plugin conflict, an outdated component, or a hosting limit. The site itself rarely breaks on its own. Something changed, and two pieces stopped agreeing.
That's useful to know because it narrows the search. When a WordPress site goes wrong, the question isn't "what's broken" — it's "what changed recently."
We maintain WordPress sites for clients and see the same handful of failures repeatedly. Here's what causes each one and what to do about it.
Why do WordPress sites break in the first place?
A WordPress site is your theme, the core software, and every plugin you've installed — all updating on separate schedules, all written by different people.
Most of the time they coexist fine. Occasionally a plugin update assumes a newer version of PHP than your host runs, or two plugins try to modify the same thing, and something gives way.
This is why "it was working yesterday" is so common. Nobody touched the site. A plugin updated itself overnight.
The practical takeaway: before changing anything, ask what updated recently. Your hosting control panel and WordPress's own update history will usually tell you.
Why is my WordPress site suddenly slow?
Four causes account for almost all of it: large unoptimised images, too many plugins, no caching, or hosting that's been outgrown.
Images are the most common and the easiest to fix. A photo straight from a phone camera can be 4–6 MB. Ten of those on a page and the page is 50 MB. Compress images and convert them to WebP before uploading — most sites see a large improvement from this alone.
Plugins add weight even when unused. Every active plugin loads code on every page. Deactivating isn't enough — delete the ones you don't use.
Caching stores a ready-made copy of each page instead of rebuilding it for every visitor. A caching plugin is one of the highest-value changes on most WordPress sites.
Hosting is the one people avoid looking at. Cheap shared hosting puts hundreds of sites on one server. If your site was fine and has gradually slowed as traffic grew, the host may simply be the limit.
Run your site through PageSpeed Insights first. It tells you which of the four is actually your problem, rather than guessing.
What causes the WordPress white screen, and how do I fix it?
A blank white page means PHP hit a fatal error and stopped. Nothing renders because nothing finished running. The two usual causes are a plugin or theme conflict, or the site running out of memory.
First, see the actual error. Add this to wp-config.php above the line that says "stop editing":
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );The error gets written to /wp-content/debug.log and usually names the plugin or file responsible. Set WP_DEBUG back to false once you're done — you don't want errors visible to visitors.
If you can't reach wp-admin, connect by FTP or your host's file manager and rename /wp-content/plugins to plugins-off. That deactivates everything at once. If the site returns, rename it back and switch plugins on one at a time until it breaks again — that's your culprit.
If it's a memory limit, add this to wp-config.php:
define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );If that doesn't hold, your host caps it lower and you'll need to ask them.
What do I do if I'm locked out of the WordPress admin?
It depends which kind of locked out.
Password not working: use the "Lost your password" link first. If the reset email never arrives — common on shared hosting where mail isn't configured — reset it directly in the database through phpMyAdmin. Find the wp_users table, edit your row, set a new user_pass value and choose MD5 as the function. WordPress will upgrade the hash on your next login.
Login page loads but rejects you, or redirects in a loop: usually a plugin. Rename the plugins folder by FTP as described above.
"Too many failed attempts": a security plugin has locked your IP. Most store a whitelist you can edit, but the quickest route is renaming that plugin's folder by FTP.
Your admin account has vanished entirely: treat that as a compromise, not a glitch. Skip to the next section.
How do I know if my WordPress site has been hacked?
The clearest signs are administrator accounts you don't recognise, pages appearing that nobody created, your site redirecting visitors elsewhere, or a browser warning when you visit.
Two subtler ones worth knowing about:
Spam that only search engines see. Some injections serve normal content to visitors and hidden spam to crawlers — often pharmaceutical or gambling text. Your site looks fine to you. Search Console shows pages you never made. Check Search Console → Pages for URLs you don't recognise.
Files modified when nobody was working. In your file manager, sort by last modified. A PHP file in an images folder is never legitimate. Neither is a core file edited at 3am on a Sunday.
If you find any of this, do these in order:
- Change every password — hosting, FTP, database, WordPress admin — before cleaning anything. Attackers usually leave a way back in, and cleaning files without rotating credentials means they return.
- Check Search Console → Security Issues, and confirm no users have been added to your property that you don't recognise.
- Restore from a backup taken before the compromise, if you have one.
- Update WordPress core, every theme and every plugin.
- Delete any plugin or theme you're not using. Abandoned plugins that stopped receiving security updates are a common entry point.
If you can't identify the entry point, assume it's still open. A site that gets cleaned but not secured is usually reinfected within weeks.
Why did an update break my site's layout?
Because your theme and the updated component disagree about something, and the theme lost.
This happens most often after a major update to the WordPress core, a page builder, or the theme itself — particularly with heavily customised themes or ones that haven't been updated in years.
Immediate fix: restore the backup you took before updating. If you didn't take one, roll back the specific plugin to its previous version — several free plugins do this — and see whether the layout returns.
Preventing it properly: update on a staging copy first, not the live site. Most decent hosts offer one-click staging. Test the pages that matter, then push the change live. It adds ten minutes and removes the entire category of problem.
Also check your PHP version. Sites running very old PHP hit compatibility failures with newer plugins, and the error can look like a layout problem rather than a version problem.
When should you fix it yourself, and when should you call someone?
Reasonable to handle yourself: compressing images, deleting unused plugins, installing a caching plugin, resetting a password, updating things after taking a backup.
Worth getting help: anything involving a hacked site, editing the database, a white screen you can't trace after deactivating plugins, or a site that's your main source of enquiries and has been down for hours.
The dividing line is usually risk rather than difficulty. Deleting a plugin is easy to undo. A bad database edit on a site with no backup is not.
If you'd rather not handle this yourself, we keep WordPress sites updated, backed up and monitored — see our website maintenance services.