So…I have run into the nightmare that no bloggers like to see: my site went down.
It was actually raised by a friend of mine as I happily gloated about the fact that I finally set live a restaurant review that I wrote around 5 months ago (the, ahem, duck and waffle one), and this morning she came back saying that she couldn’t open the page.
This has happened before, and in the past this had always been caused by a plugin going astray. When this happens, the fix was quite easy: you just have to turn off the plugin one by one until you isolate the trouble-maker, then simply find an alternative.
This time, however, was different. Not only did I get the dreaded “you have a critical error” message, but that I have lost all my admin access: I was no longer able to get into my site: the admin page of my domain didn’t work because, well, the entire domain went down; and accessing the admin through wordpress told me that the site could no longer be accessed. In short, there is no way for me to even access and turn off any plugin to troubleshoot or fix the problems.
After half a day of work, I have finally got it live again, and I wanted to document how that was done in a fairly non techy way so that I can have a future reference, or if any of you happen to have come across the same issue you’d have a user’s point of reference. (spoiler: I did have to ask for help, which you can find towards the end of the article)
