Solving WordPress Internal Server Error – 500

An Internal Server Error – 500 is the most common error code you will encounter after 404 errors. While a 404 Error means “Page Not Found” and is much simple to rectify, the 500 error conveys a rather sarcastic message ” Internal Server Error”. It’s like as if you can not do anything.

In fact, there’s a lot that can be done. On WordPress, the error maybe difficult to rectify in certain situations where you don’t have FTP access. Most of the times this can be resolved via the following steps :

Prior Backup

With computers, it’s always a good idea to maintain weekly / monthly backups. As in times like these, a backup can be uploaded and most of the times the problem is resolved. It’s like a reset button that you should always keep in handy.

WordPress Backup involves two steps :

- Content Backup : Backing up Files via FTP Access

-Database Backup : Exporting .sql script file via PHPAdmin

File Permissions via FTP

At times, the error may occur due to incorrect file permission. WordPress may not be able to read/write to a file which it needs access to and therefore giving an error on the Server. In order to solve this problem, you need to do CHMOD through your FTP client. This simply means changing files permissions.

On Linux servers, CHMOD is performed using different codes. Depending on your FTP Client, the interface may defer though you’ll always have values similar to the following screenshot :

CHMOD - File Permissions

755 means permission to Read[ALL], Write[OWNER], Execute[ALL] which works in most cases. If this does not solve the error try using the other permission change.

777 means permission to Read[ALL], Write[ALL], Execute[ALL]. Although this allows full access to everyone, it may also be an unsecure file permission though in case of non critical files like say Themes it works best.

If your 500 error does not get resolved even after the above 2 steps then the problem may lie somewhere else.

Bad/Incompatible Plugins

WordPress is notorious for churning out frequent and untimely platform upgrades. Though this usually happens for security’s sake to iron out any bugs that are discovered sometimes in the process Plugins might get broken. These plugin which worked with prior version of WordPress might suddenly stop working after a WordPress upgrade.

Sometimes the plugin may cause errors due to bad coding on part of the programmer. This results not from bad logic but because of constraints in testing.

• Try disabling the plugin if you have Admin access to WordPress
• Otherwise, access WP-Content ->Plugins directory through FTP and rename / delete the errant plugin.

The plugin will then be disabled automatically then you login Admin panel and 500 Internal error hopefully might just vanish.

High Traffic Surge

At times when all the above remedies fail, this one might just work. I have experienced this problem on different reputed hosts and it took me a lot of time to figure out the exact cause. The Blog works fine 90% of the time but suddenly it starts giving 500 errors for say some 15 mins then it gets normal again.

The reason is high traffic. The Web Host is not able to coup up with the surge in traffic and generates a 500 Internal Server error. For small to medium-sized blogs this can be resolved by using a Caching plugin in WordPress. For other blogs with high traffic, moving on the VPS or dedicated server might be a more practical solution.

Here is a post I published along-with a screen-cast on Is your Blog ready to take on huge traffic spikes ? [Guide]

If you have any questions, drop them as comments below. I’ll be more than willing to answer them.

Tagged as: Blogging, Errors, Web Development