This hasn’t happen in a long, long time, but I got a 500 error on the tongfamily.com site, which is pretty bad. The troubleshooting is pretty complicated, but it comes down to, on Bluehost.com:
- Make sure you have ssh access to the site. You should enable ssh access on the Bluehost.com Cpanel then upload you public ssh key and make sure that your ~/.ssh/config points to it.
- Now you can ssh into the client and then follow the directions onĀ WP BeginnerĀ where are first to move Ā .htaccess to .htaccess.bak. many errors are related to this. This actually didn’t help.
- Then move wp-content/plugins to wp-content/plugins.old to delete all the plugins
This actually got my site back to life, you you know that it is a plugin problem.
Now you have to to through the process of reinstalling them 1 by 1:
- Jetpack. This is the key plugin that allows connection to WordPress.com. This was super broken now that the plugin is gone. So Remove the site on WordPress.com.
- I actually then had an .htacess problem and a 404 error because I was using word fence, so the permissions are too tight on the site.
- Then reinstall jetpack again and it seems to basically work.
- Now you try again to make it work, but JetPack seems still to have these errors, so try to install word fence to fix it.
- The one error I get with Wordfence and with the whole site is that it requires a later version of PHP. WordPress says it needs 7.3, but Bluehost only supports 7.2 and looking at wordfence, it says it needs 5.3 which is confusing to say the least.
- For some reason, turning on pretty permalink seems to solve the JetPack problem.