Sudden 500 Internal Server Error on WordPress

05/16/10 by admin | Recent Posts, Wordpress | 2 Comments »

Today I was working away behind the scenes when all of a sudden out of no where my site was down!  500 Errors and no access to my wp- admin panel.

There can be a few reasons this happens, but the first thing to do is NOT Panic.

The majority of the time it’s either:

• Permissions
• Plugins
• or your .htaccess file

After checking my .htaccess file and the permissions on my site using my ftp, my last resort was to head over to my phpMyAdmin from my Cpanel and disable all of my plugins.

Disabling Your WordPress Plugins without Admin Access – Method 1

1. Login to your Cpanel account and find the phpMyAdmin button or link.  This should take you to your wordpress database tables.
2. Look for the table called wp_options
3. Then look under the option_name column (field) and  find the  active_plugins row (you may need to go to page 2)
4. Once you’ve found that row, click on the pencil icon to edit.
5. Under the option_value field you will see a whole bunch of data which relates to your plugins.  Highlight the whole field, then copy and paste to a text document.
6. Once you’ve copied (backed up) the data, replace the current data with  a:0:{}

Hit GO

You should now have complete access to your wordpress admin.

The next step is to re-activate the plugins one by one to see which one might have cause the problem.

Another alternative method is:

Disabling Your WordPress Plugins without Admin Access – Method 2

Here you’ll be creating a dummy folder called Plugins so you can gain access to your wp-admin.

1. Using either your FTP or your host’s control panel, navigate to the wp-contents folder (directory)
2. Now, rename the folder “plugins” to “plugins.hold”
3. create a new folder called “plugins”
4. You should be able to login to your WordPress administration, so try now
5. Once you are able to login, either by FTP or your host’s control panel, delete the empty “plugins” you
6. rename the folder  “plugins.hold” back to “plugins”

Hope this helps and remember….Don’t panic!

~Toresa