How To Fix Internal Server Error In WordPress

The first thing to do is to turn on the debugging option on your WordPress website. This allows you to see what is going on.

To do this, go to your site’s wp-config.php file and edit it. You need to find the line that says:

define( "WP_DEBUG", true );

If you can’t find it, you might need to add it to the file. Be sure to save the new version of the wp-config.php file.

With debugging turned on, reload your site and navigate through both the front end and the admin area. The debug output should now display PHP errors and warnings directly on the screen, including the file path where the issue originates. Look for phrases like “Fatal error in…” or “Call to undefined function in…” followed by a file path — these point directly to the theme or plugin causing the problem. If you see a specific plugin name in the error path, skip straight to Step Three and disable that plugin first before disabling everything.

If you don’t know where the problem is, then you need to disable all plugins and switch themes. To do this you need to go to the plugins file in your WordPress files, using an FTP client and then change the name of the plugins file to ‘plugins_disable‘. Then immediately rename the file to ‘plugins‘ again.

This will disable all the plugins. Check your website now. It should display, but it will not have many of the features.

You can do the same with the themes.

If you notice your website is back on and displaying, it is a plugin/theme causing a problem. You can switch them on, one at a time, to find out which one is causing the problem. You can do this in the dashboard.

Again working in the FTP client locate, create a local backup and then delete .htaccess file on the server. If your website starts working, it is because there was an error within the .htaccess file. Now you can start to find out the problem by uploading your local back up and deleting sections.

Every time you delete a section, test your website. If your website works again, that section was causing an error and you can reload the entire file minus that section.

Another common problem is that the memory limit has been exceeded. This seems to be more common with websites on shared hosting. To change this, you need to go to the wp-config.php file through your FTP client.

Then find the line that starts

wp_memory_limit

Change the value after this to 64M.

If that line doesn’t exist, add in the following code.

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

This should solve the problem, for a while. However, there could be an underlying issue, such as a faulty plugin that is using all your resources.

If none of the steps above have resolved the error, there are a few more things to try before contacting your host. First, check your file permissions via your FTP client — WordPress files should be set to 644 and directories to 755. Incorrect permissions are a surprisingly common cause of 500 errors that don’t show up in debug logs. Second, try re-uploading the WordPress core files by downloading a fresh copy from WordPress.org and replacing everything except your wp-content folder and wp-config.php file. This fixes corrupted core files without touching your content.

If the error persists after all of the above, contact your hosting provider’s support team. They can access server-level error logs that you cannot see and identify configuration issues on their end.