In my role as WordPress superhero, helping the panicking hordes over many sites and forums and under at least 3 different aliases, I encounter newbie WordPress admins with similar problems quite regularly. What may seem obvious to a more experienced user can be very confusing if you’re completely new to this stuff, and not enough people are patient enough to explain things in simple terms. This is a small effort to right that wrong.

Step 1

Most solutions can be summed up with the instruction “turn your plugins off and see if that fixes it” so from now on that will be known as “Step 1″.

1.  “All my posts just disappeared!”

This is very scary, I know from experience, but try to remain calm while initializing Step 1.  If a plugin-less blog is still insisting it has no posts, step 2 is to log into phpmyadmin and repair your posts table. That sounds really complicated but if your host has given you access to cpanel it’s easy. You can follow the instructions in this post to repair the table, which will usually be named wp_posts.

2. “My admin panel is unresponsive, I can’t open the sliding menus or drag widgets around”

This is usually caused by a badly-coded theme or plugin, so it’s mainly a case of finding out which is causing it. Of course I refer you back to Step 1. If this works, it’s time to enable your plugins one by one until you find the culprit. If it didn’t work, try changing back to the original theme without re-enabling any plugins so you essentially have a clean slate. If that still doesn’t work then it’s possible your WP files have just become corrupted, you can try re-uploading everything in wp-admin/js.

3. “My images won’t display”

Ok it’s less likely that Step 1 will work here, but try it anyway because you never know. This problem is usually referring to images that are shown on the homepage, or in a featured content area, rather than images within posts. If Step 1 is unsuccessful you first need to find out how the images are being included in your page.

Find some unique text near to where the image should be showing up, and search for it in your page source (usually ctrl-u). Once you’ve found it, look for a nearby img tag and that is your failing image. If you see the word “timthumb” anywhere inside this tag, then your theme is using a very popular image resizing script. It will not work if the image you’re trying to display is externally hosted.

Try copying everything in the image source, for example everything in bold here <img src=”http://thingy.com/some/stuff/timthumb.php?src=http://thingy.com/blahblahblah.jpg“>. Paste that into your address bar in your browser and see what happens. If an image shows up, then I’m as stumped as you. If you’re met with a blank screen, try removing the image domain from the path (so my example would turn into http://thingy.com/some/stuff/timthumb.php?src=blahblahblah.jpg) and see if that helps. If it does, you’ll either need to edit your template file to remove that domain or if you’re using custom fields to add the images, just edit it there.

Note: If your theme is not using timthumb or any similar resizing script, and is instead using WP to resize the images, there’s not much that can be going wrong. Check your media library to be sure the image hasn’t been accidentally deleted.

4. “There’s a weird link in my footer to something irrelevant and I can’t seem to get rid of it”

Commonly caused by a natural desire to get something for nothing, it’s possible you’ve chosen a free theme with encoded spam links in the footer. I don’t want to alarm you here, but it’s even possible this is a pirated copy of a paid theme and you could end up being caught and asked to take it down. Before we get to that point, however, make a start on Step 1 as some plugins will also insert links down here. If this is the case, they often have an option to turn it off under their settings.

So Step 1 was unsuccessful? Open your theme’s footer.php and search for the link text. If you can’t see it, and especially if you see anything that looks like a long string of random letters and numbers, we have a worst case scenario. My best advice is to ditch that dodgy theme.

It’s worth noting, free theme users, that spam links can often be inserted without actually being obvious on your page. It’s always a good idea to check the footer.php of any free theme you download, since this is the most common place for such code (though it could be pretty much anywhere). Plenty of free themes are totally fine, but better safe than sorry.

WordPress superhero, away!

4 seems like an odd number of things to cover, but more will no doubt rear their ugly heads and be dealt with in similar fashion in a future post. If you’ve run into any newbie problems running your blog, ask away in the comments and maybe I can point you in the right direction. Credits to @andinarvaez and wwe9112, among others, for inspiring this post.