How to Fix a Broken WordPress Website: Easy Debugging Tips for Beginners

Is your WordPress website suddenly broken or displaying strange errors? Don’t panic—you’re not alone. WordPress powers a massive number of websites globally, including many in Ghana, which makes it a common target for technical glitches caused by plugins, themes, or updates.

In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn how to debug and fix a broken WordPress site quickly and easily—without always needing to hire a developer. Whether you can still access your dashboard or are locked out completely, we’ll walk you through practical solutions you can try on your own to get your site back online fast. Let’s get started.

Debugging A WordPress Site from Admin dashboard

if You have access to your WordPress website’s Admin dashboard you can debug it by following this steps;

Check for plugins compatibility

1. Disable Active all WordPress Plugins; you can do this by going to the plugins page, you need to deactivate all the active plugins, most of wordpress problems are as a result of plugin compatibility, so after deactivating all plugins try to re-activate them again to see if the Website loads as normal.
2. Reactivate the plugins one after the order; since your website now loads normal what you need to do is to re-activate the plugins again one after the other, so after activating each plugin you should load the website on a different tab or browser, when the plugin causing this issue is activated it will probably show the same error message again so now you can either update the plugin if its outdated or delete it to avoid the problem.

De-activate WordPress Themes

1. De-activate and revert to the default WordPress Theme; just as plugins can break your website so does themes, so you may need to revert to the default WordPress theme and see if the problem persists.
2. Delete Themes you no longer need; some WordPress users are fun of leaving outdated themes and tens of themes they don’t even need on their website, the wisest thing to do is to have one custom made theme and the default WordPress theme to always fall back to incase something happens.

Method 2 of how to debug & fix broken WordPress website.

How to Debug the Website when you cannot Login to your dashboard

Sometimes when a website is broken it might kick you out of your dashboard as well, so how do you fix this?

Login to Cpanel or FTP Client to Debug and fix the problem.

If it so happens that you are not able to login to your Dashboard you can either login to your web hosting control panel, to access your File manager.

How to login to Cpanel

You can login to your cpanel control panel by simply typing your website address followed by /cpanel e.g www.mywebsite.com/cpanel. and login using your password and username.

After login into your cpanel or FTP Client navigate to your public.html folder you can find your themes in the folder named themes and your plugins in the plugins folder.