I feel sick!! Just crashed my Wordpress website can anyone help?

[DanglyEarOrnaments]

So sorry to post here I know it's not an AIBU but I'm so desperate for help.

I wrote my website years ago, content from the heart, clients love what''s written. I paid a web designer to improve the appearance and for SEO to rank us on page 1 of all our service areas, this cost a lot of money. I've spent years learning Wordpress and improving it even though I never thought I could do, I did learn to improve it through youtube tutorials and I made it look exactly as I wanted. It brings ALL our business other than referrals. Sounds daft but it's a huge and personal thing for me.

Obviously our business relies upon it. I was stupidly just trying to improve it again and tried installing a plug in and it's just crashed.

I've read it's called the 'white screen of death' and not to panic and to remove the offending plug in but i don't understand how if I cannot access the admin page (or any of it).

I feel like it's beyond my capacity to fix it but I must. I have staff relying on me. Why did I do this? I can't even call anyone as web designers are all closed on Sunday evening.

Does anyone know what to do before I just vomit?

Hi, I am a web designer and host a few hundred sites so may be able to assist (FOC).... do you know what the plugin was that you have updated and where is the site being hosted?

Wp fixit are a great company who can rescue sites from all sorts of messes. You had backups?

Hi - oh thank you so much!

The sight is being hosted at Fasthosts and the plugin was called HTML and was a 'header footer' plugin.

Definitely don't panic. It happens, and it's almost always fixable, usually very quickly.

Wonga - no I don't have, I'm useless, I never knew this could ever happen!

But thank you thank you, I'll look into Wp fixit.

Wonga really thank you so much, that's what I was hoping and praying to hear!

It's very likely to be a plug-in conflict.

Are you confident going into your host - file manager - then I to the files wp- content - plug-ins.

Couple of choices. If you know the plugin that's borked it then rename that plugin folder.

If you don't know the plugin rename the whole plugin folder (add a 1 at start even)

That should get your site back up.

If you want more of a talk through tomorrow send me a pm and I can email you more details

(I fix WordPress sites as my job - hard to explain on here on my phone but at my desk tomorrow)

I've done that too! It was a dodgy plug in update. A developer sorted it out for me.

totally that is so kind of you. Thank you so much!

I feel like I've lost my confidence to touch anything right now, I just feel frozen with the fear, but I could try tomorrow and I feel so much better for knowing there's ways around it.

I can't tell you what this means

It seems like there’s plenty of help here OP. Hope you have success. If you have no joy please feel free to message me.

It can be fixed. I see this all the time from clients, first time it happens it's terrifying!

I'll send a pm over with my email in and you can send me a message tomorrow if you need to

Once it's fixed, buy a backup service - blog vault is good - and set it up. Always backup before activating new plugins.

Don't fret though. It's horrible the first time it happens. Once you've done it a few times and got through it you realise it's way it is, and that's why you do backups.

Thank you Wonga I definitely will do that!