How to Recover Your Website after a Fatal Error

There may be a time when you are locked out of your WordPress admin dashboard or your site is down due to a fatal error. 

In this article, we will show you what to do when you are locked out of your WordPress admin dashboard (generally /wp-admin), so you can regain access to your site.


In most cases, this is caused by PHP errors.

These errors can occur for many reasons, including conflicts with other plugins or themes, PHP being called elsewhere, or even installation errors.

If your site is taken down by a PHP error, we strongly recommend consulting your hosting provider before attempting a fix yourself. If this is not possible or your hosting provider does not provide any assistance, please follow the below instructions carefully (and strongly consider changing the hosting provider).

For the manual fix, you would need to use an FTP client, such as Filezilla. Once you have installed the FTP client or gained access at the root level through your host client, follow the steps below:

  • Go to the plugins folder within /wp-content and rename the folder to something other than “plugins” to disable all plugins.
  • You should now be able to log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
  • Note that the Plugins will be disabled and you will not have access to them.
  • Go back to the folder that you renamed via FTP and change the plugin's folder name.
  • Your Plugins will appear again in your WordPress Dashboard but will all be deactivated
  • From here you can turn on each plugin to see which may have caused the conflict.

If you have a solution that is not mentioned in this article, then please share it with us in support and we can have it added as a possible solution.

Still need help? Contact Us Contact Us