Sometimes, and probably more often that you would like, things don’t go smoothly. Your site is down, you aren’t receiving email or a commonly used tool does not work in WordPress. Recently, three such incidences were diagnosed and corrected.
- A client’s website was not being backed up by our weekly tool and was giving a 500 error message…. the site was down. A call to Bluehost identified the problem as malware somewhere on the site. A website can have a lot of code, but it is not impossible to find the line causing the problem. Just a little googling of the malware identified by BH and the url address in the scan report can locate it. The site was up within a day. How did the malware get in? Most likely from clicking on a suspicious email or using an unsafe password. I recommend Last Pass or a similar tool for keeping more complex passwords.
- An associate was transferring to me their control of a complex website. But the director was not receiving an important email “info@” for whatever reason. I had to log into the hosting but it was denying me access and needed confirmation from info@. Ha! Catch 22. So the two of us past and present webmasters worked together from her laptop to create an email for me and a new one for the director. Now there is access and email success. (My suspicion is the original @info email created for the director was misspelled!)
- New client, new website and a page with a simple pdf download and link that was not working correctly. The client is savvy and eager to learn, but just could not figure it out. I looked at it with her and knew that there was something else behind the scenes affecting the page. Last resort: look at the plugins. Sometimes that are not compatible with your theme or builder. I turned off a few at a time and found the plugin that was causing the issue. Not an important plugin so it was trashed. Plugins can become out of date when their developers don’t service them properly.
None of these are a huge deal but can be very frustrating to someone who doesn’t have the experience of seeing these problems time and again. Clients can consult with me when they need to and know there is a solution.