Trouble Shooting a Broken WordPress Theme

If you’ve been visiting my blog over the past couple of weeks you may have found a few things haven’t been working properly. From images not displaying, menu items not being clickable, and very slow loading times.

Honestly, when something goes wrong with your blog and especially if you find yourself with a broken WordPress theme, which is the first thing a reader sees, it can leave you feeling panicked. You’ll be wondering if you’ll be able to fix it, if you’ll need a fresh WordPress installation (hopefully not!) or if you’ll need to shed out more for a new theme.

Unfortunatly this isn’t the first time I’ve experienced issues with WordPress; I’ve having previously been hacked(!), lost all my data and been unable to access my admin panel!😵 It’s certainly a worrying situation to be in, but I have a few steps that may help fix things with your broken WordPress theme, before you decide to pull the plug on your blog.

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Read more: Using phpMyAdmin to restore lost content

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1. Back up your WordPress installation.

This is something you should be doing regularly anyway but just in case you’re not or it’s been a while, back up before begining any of these steps.

2. Reinstall your current theme

If it’s an issue with the theme the best thing you can do is reinstall to a previous version or do a fresh installation of the current one. It could be the installation didn’t complete properly, one of the most common causes can be your internet going down.

3. Try switching to one of the default themes (twenty nineteen etc).

If reinstalling your theme didn’t work, try switching to one of the default themes and see if you’re still having issues. This should show you if the problem is with your new theme or something else.

4. Turn off (deactivate) your plugins.

Yes ALL of them. Some plugins functions can interfere with certain themes.

4. Re-activate each plugin individually.

Check your theme after each plugin has been re-activated and you should find the one that’s causing issues.

5. Remove the problem plugin.

Once you’ve identified the problem plugin, deactivate and delete it. For those who are interested, the problem plugin for me turned out to be the Speed Booster Pack.

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I hope this helps anyone in a similar situation! It’s very disheartening to put so much work into your blog or website and then find it isn’t working correctly.