Sometimes it’s inevitable that things don’t go smoothly. Your site is down, you aren’t receiving email or a commonly used tool does not work in WordPress. Read how three such incidences were diagnosed and corrected.

1. 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 for someone with experience to find the line causing the problem. Just a little googling of the malware identified by the hosting company and the url address in the ‘scan report’ can locate it. I was able to find the bad code and  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.

1. An associate was transferring to me their control of a complex website. I sucessfully logged into the hosting but it was denying me access and needed confirmation from info@. But the director was not receiving that email “info@” for whatever reason (…a misspelled name on the email!.} So the two of us past and present webmasters worked together to create an email for me and a new one for the director. Now there is access and email success. (My suspicion that the original @info email created for the director was misspelled was correct!)

1. 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 these 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 one, it turned out. Plugins can become buggie when the developers don’t update 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.