How to Fix This Site is Experiencing Technical Difficulties Error

Are you getting messages like "This site is experiencing technical difficulties," or "There has been a critical error on your site"? These are known as Fatal Errors and usually indicate your WordPress site is down due to issues with a plugin or theme. You can resolve these errors by identifying the plugin or theme causing the issue, then deactivating it. Here's how to do that:

1. First, check the admin email associated with your site for any instructions. It may provide details on which theme or plugin is causing the error. If so, checking the error logs is not necessary and you can skip to the steps below about “Disabling the Problematic Plugin or Theme”.
2. If your website is not hosted at 10Web, please contact your hosting provider for further guidance.
3. If your website is hosted at 10Web, begin by clicking on the website experiencing the error in your 10Web dashboard. 

Steps to resolve fatal errors on 10Web hosted websites:

Check the error log to find which plugin or theme is causing the error.

1. Under Hosting Services, click on Logs.
   
2. Select Error.Log from the drop-down menu.
3. Search through the error log for entries starting with PHP Fatal Error. Check for the plugin or theme name in the file path, which should look like either:
   1. wp-content/plugins/[plugin name] or
   2. wp-content/themes/[theme name].

Disabling the Problematic Plugin or Theme:

Once you’ve identified the plugin or theme causing the error, you can use SFTP to deactivate it by renaming its folder. After renaming the folder, you should be able to access your website normally.

1. Open an FTP client like FileZilla to access your website files.
2. Log in to your hosting server using the SFTP credentials in your 10Web Dashboard located under Hosting Services > Credentials.
   
3. In FileZilla, navigate to /home/wplive/web/wp-live/wp-content/ and double-click on the themes or plugins folder identified in the error log.
4. Locate the specific theme or plugin's folder you identified from the error log and right-click the folder to rename it. This will effectively deactivate the problematic theme or plugin.
   

Contact the theme or plugin’s support

After identifying and disabling the plugin or theme that caused the issue, contact their respective support channel and report the PHP error for further assistance.