Troubleshooting Your WordPress Upgrade

With WordPress regularly cranking out new versions and updates, upgrading your WordPress-driven website has now become a regular occurrence. Or perhaps, it has become a regular annoyance.

Fortunately, upgrading your website is not particularly difficult, even for a first-timer. And WordPress even supplies plenty of documentation to help you get it done. (See the short WordPress upgrade guide or the extended upgrade guide.)

Unfortunately, the guide does not sufficiently cover the problems that may occur during an upgrade. So we have listed a few problems below and some potential fixes.

Your WordPress Blog Is Blank

If your blog is blank right after your upgrade, see our article on this topic: Uh Oh! My WordPress Blog Is Blank!!!.

You Cannot Login to the Admin Area

If you can't log in to the admin area, there are two potential fixes:

1. All admin files may not have been uploaded. Even if it appears that you have uploaded all files via FTP, sometimes problems do happen. And in many cases, there is no error message alerting you to the problem of an incomplete upload. To fix this problem, simply upload all core files again.
2. It might be a cookie problem. Whenever you login to your dashboard admin area, WordPress software creates a little cookie on your system. (A cookie, according to WordPress is 'a  tiny piece of information stored on your computer, to verify who you are.') When you upgrade, the cookies from the previous version still exist and are often incompatible. As a result, you are denied from logging in. To fix this problem, simply go into the Option in your browser and delete your cookies. (To selectively delete cookies, navigate to the cookies for your domain name, and only delete those.)

You Get a Database Connection Error

Oops! This means that you have probably overwritten or made erroneous changes to your wp-config.php file. Open the file and verify that all of the information is correct. If you have upgraded from a very old version of WordPress (ie. earlier than 2.5), you might want to compare the structure of your wp-config file with the current upgraded structure which has introduced additional security mechanisms.

Your Automatic WordPress Upgrade Won't Complete

Usually, upgrading your site via the automatic upgrade is as simple as clicking the Update Now button and waiting for the process to complete. But sometimes it doesn't work. Some reasons why the automatic upgrade fails is:

1. Your Server Is Out of Memory of Disk Space. To retrieve the new WordPress files and unpack them on your server, there needs to be enough memory and disk space.
2. Incorrect File Permissions. Before any files can be saved or updated, WordPress needs access to do this. What this means is that your files should be owned by the server.
3. Incompatibile Server Environment. WordPress has certain minimum requirements for it to run. If you are trying to install the latest version, make sure that your server is running at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
4. Bad Plugins. Some plugins may interfere with automatic update. It might be necessary to deactivate them.
5. Odd Glitch. Sometimes there is no explainable reason and simply pressing the Update Now button again will fix the issue.

You Have Page Not Found Errors

Sometimes after upgrading, all pages other than the home page throw Page Not Found errors. This is usually due to the .htaccess file and your permalink structure. To fix this, reset your permalink structure by reverting to the default structure and then switching back to your desired permalink structure. This will rebuild your .htaccess file, and should hopefully fix any Page Not Found errors.

Need Additional Help?

One great thing about WordPress is that there is a large community of people who use it. So if you've had a WordPress-related problem, it is likely that someone else has had this problem and has found a solution to solve it. To get experts or other WordPress users to answer your questions, simply start a new thread on the WordPress.org support forums.

Want a professional to upgrade your website? Contact us.