How Cheryl Microutsicos Used Staging to Troubleshoot a Blank WP-Admin
Spending hours maintaining client sites?
WP Remote will streamline your WordPress maintenance process and save you at least 4 hours per site every week.
Challenges
Results
Problem: Staring at a blank screen
WordPress sites often seize up for no apparent reason. One minute they are working as expected, the next you can’t save a post, edit a page, upload an image, or even get the homepage to load.
“I had a site where I wasn’t able to edit the blog posts. Whenever I tried to edit, it just came up with a blank screen.”
Step 1: Troubleshoot
Most WordPress admins follow specific troubleshooting steps for common issues. These steps usually fix 95% of problems.
“I went through, and did all the normal troubleshooting with WordPress. Disabled all the plugins, enabling the basic theme, go through the PHP error logs, and so on. All these things that I tried to do usually help. But I just could not figure out why I couldn’t edit this site.”
But, when all the normal troubleshooting steps fail, you need to dig a little deeper.
Step 2: Debug offline
Up until this time, you can do most of the steps on the live site. It isn’t recommended, because you may end up causing more problems that you began with, but they are still relatively minor—and reversible.
But when nothing seems to set the site straight, you need to pull out the big guns: staging.
“I just used the most recent backup, and created a staging site. Then, I did the comparison of the tables and there was a table that was corrupted.”
By comparing the live and staging sites, Cheryl was able to pinpoint exactly where the issue was. And by merging staging to live on WP Remote, she fixed it in seconds.
“I don’t think it was an overall problem with the website, I think it was my user session. But when I was able to take the staging session back to live, and write over that table. It fixed everything.”
Result: All’s well that ends well
Debugging is not always a straightforward road. There are curves, u-bends, and more curves. Having a backup—and integrated staging—is invaluable.
“Yeah, it was crazy. I should have done the staging first, because it would have been better for me to do all the troubleshooting on a staging site rather than the live one. I was doing it at a time where I knew it wouldn’t cause any issue with the website.”
“Next time I would go straight to WP Remote’s staging site. If I had done it earlier, it would have saved me a couple of hours at least.”
Cheryl Microutsicos
Cheryl Microutsicos
Cheryl founded WoW! Graphic Designs to help women entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Her particular focus has been to support mompreneurs achieve success, while maintaining a sustainable work-life balance. Using WP Remote, Cheryl supports over 60 websites.
Tags:
Share it:
You may also like
How Daniel Used Visual Regression Make Updates A Superpower
WP Remote’s visual regression caught a 0.03% variance after an update. Daniel was going about his day as usual, when WP Remote’s support team reached out to him. One of…
How Daniel Used Reports to Stop Customer Churn
Figuring out the problem: why customers were leaving. Customer churn is a part and parcel of doing business. Nevertheless, it is always a cause for concern. “During the first part…
One-Click Hack Cleanups: How Daniel Duke Finds and Cleans Malware in Seconds
I’m thrilled to have a security option that is affordable and works all kinds of magic for me.
Looking for the ultimate site insurance?
WP Remote has the most powerful site maintenance features on a single dashboard. They are as easy to use as clicking a single button. Supercharge your client site maintenance—with minimal effort.
