Nothing kills your morning coffee faster than opening your website and seeing a blank white page; or worse, “There has been a critical error on this website” staring back at you where your homepage used to be. If you’re here because that just happened to you, take a breath. You can fix WordPress errors like this one, and in most cases, faster than you’d think.
CANS Marketing manage WordPress sites for clients all day, every day, and honestly, most of the panic around a broken website is unnecessary. Learning how to fix WordPress issues doesn’t take a computer science degree; it takes a calm process and knowing where to look first. A WordPress error almost never means your content is gone. It usually means one small thing; a plugin, a theme; a memory setting is fighting with another small thing. Below, we’ll walk through why these errors happen, how to troubleshoot them yourself, and when it just makes more sense to hand out the keys to someone who does this for a living. No matter what’s broken, our team can take a look and get it fixed; you don’t need to be technical to reach out and get real solutions.
Why WordPress Sites Break in the First Place
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you first launch a WordPress site: it’s not a “set it and forget it” product. It’s more like a car; it needs oil changes. Plugins update. Themes update. PHP versions change on your hosting server. Any one of those moving parts can bump into another and cause an error.
From what we see across client sites week to week, the usual suspects are:
- A plugin update that wasn’t tested against your current WordPress version
- Two plugins quietly doing the same job and stepping on each other
- A theme update overwriting custom code
- A hosting server running low on PHP memory
- Someone editing a file directly without a backup (we’ve all done it once)
- Occasionally, a hack or malware injection
Once you know the usual culprits, tracking down the actual cause of your WordPress critical error stops feeling like guesswork and starts feeling like a checklist; which is really all it takes to fix WordPress errors most of the time.
Common WordPress Errors (And How to Fix WordPress Errors Like Them)
Not every broken site looks the same. Here are the ones that show up in our inbox most often.
“There Has Been a Critical Error on This Website”
If your search brought you here because of this exact message, you’re not alone; it’s the single most common thing people type into Google when their site goes down. WordPress shows this generic wording on purpose, to avoid exposing technical details to the public. It’s frustrating because it tells you something broke without telling you what. But under the hood, it’s almost always a plugin or theme of conflict, or a PHP compatibility issue. It’s rarely a sign that your site or your data is actually gone.
A Plugin Not Working in WordPress
The second most common complaint we hear: “My plugin just stopped working.” Sometimes it fails quietly. Sometimes it takes the whole site down with it. Either way, it’s usually tied to an update that didn’t play nicely with your current setup, or two plugins that overlap in function and clash. A WordPress bug fix here is often just a matter of rolling back one plugin version and testing again.
500 Internal Server Errors, White Screens, and Database Connection Issues
These three show up less often but tend to worry about people the most, mostly because they look so final. They belong to the same family as the critical error message above; their symptoms of a plugin, theme, memory limit, or hosting hiccup, not evidence that your site is unrecoverable. Every error in a WordPress site has a solution once you know which of these five or six usual causes is behind it.
How to Fix WordPress Errors Tied to the Critical Error Message
Since so many people land here after searching “how to fix WordPress critical error,” let’s get specific about it. Here’s what works when you’re facing WordPress there has been a critical error on this website:
- Check your email first — WordPress often sends the site admin a notification with the real technical error the moment it happens.
- Turn on WP_DEBUG to see which file and line number is causing the crash.
- Deactivate whatever plugin you updated most recently. It’s the culprit more often than not.
- Clear your caching plugin and your host server cache — a cached version of the error page can stick around even after the actual fix is in.
- If none of that clears it, roll back to your most recent backup and reapply on your changes one at a time.
That sequence resolves the “there has been a critical error on this website” message most of the time; five steps, and you fix WordPress errors that looked unfixable ten minutes earlier.
When You Can’t Fix WordPress Errors Alone
Some issues genuinely aren’t a DIY job, and there’s no shame in that. If you’re dealing with a hacked site, malware, repeated database failures, a botched migration, or a bug that lives inside custom code, you’re past the point of a simple plugin toggle; this is the territory where you fix advanced WordPress issues, not simple ones. Trying to force a fix without a backup or staging environment at this stage can turn a bad afternoon into a bad month.
Anyone Can Get This Fixed, You Don’t Have to Be Technical
Here’s what we want people to understand: you don’t need to know PHP, you don’t need to know what a staging environment is, and you don’t need to have read this entire guide from top to bottom. If your site is down right now, you can just reach out to a real person and get it handled. That’s the whole point of having a team behind you.
At CANS Marketing, fixing broken WordPress sites is something our developers do constantly; not as a side task, but as part of how we build and maintain sites for businesses across Houston and the rest of Texas. Whether it’s a plugin conflict, a critical error, a hacked site, or something nobody’s been able to figure out, our team has a process for finding the actual cause instead of guessing. That’s the difference experience makes: a fix that takes a professional twenty minutes can eat up a whole day for someone doing it for the first time. Clients come back to us for help with WordPress problems for the same reason they trust us with their marketing; we solve the thing, not just patch around it.
You also don’t have to be a client to ask for help. Business owner, blogger, freelancer; if your site’s broken and you want it fixed by someone who’s seen the same error a hundred times before, that’s exactly what our WordPress Web Design and Development team does. We’ll tell you straight what’s wrong, what it takes to fix it, and how to keep it from happening again; no runaround, no jargon you didn’t ask for. It doesn’t matter how small the site is or how big the mess looks; we fix WordPress issues for anyone who asks, not just retainer clients.
Keeping It from Happening Again
Fixing today’s error is only half of the job. A few habits go a long way toward not being back here in six weeks:
- Update WordPress core, themes, and plugins on a set schedule, not just whenever you remember
- Test big updates on a staging site before pushing them live
- Keep automated daily backups running somewhere off your main server
- Choose hosting that performs, not just the cheapest plan you found
- Delete plugins and themes you’re not using instead of just switching them off
- Have someone monitoring uptime so you find out about problems before your customers do
FAQ: How to Fix WordPress Errors
What does “there has been a critical error on this website” actually mean?
It’s WordPress’s generic way of saying something crashed; almost always a plugin, theme, or memory issue. It does not mean your content or data has been deleted.
Will I lose my posts and pages if I get this error?
Almost never. Your content lives in the database, separate from the plugin or theme causing the crash. Fixing the error typically doesn’t touch your content at all.
Why did my plugin stop working after an update?
Usually a compatibility gap; the plugin new version wasn’t built for your current WordPress or PHP version yet. Rolling the plugin back, or updating WordPress core, usually solves it.
Can I fix this myself, or should I call someone?
Plenty of everyday errors; a plugin conflict, a theme issue are fixable by working through a clear checklist. Anything involving malware, a hacked site, or custom code is safer left to someone with experience.
How fast can this actually get fixed?
Straightforward plugin or theme conflicts are often resolved in well under an hour. Deeper hosting, security, or code-level issues take longer, but a professional team can usually still turn it around quickly.
Does CANS Marketing actually fix WordPress errors, or just build new sites?
Both. Troubleshooting and ongoing maintenance are part of our regular WordPress work, not a separate service you have to ask for. If your site’s broken, reach out through cans.net and someone will actually look at it.
