In this video I’ll show you how to enable debugging on your WordPress site so you can troubleshoot any issues that your site is having.

Imagine the situation, your WordPress site has crashed and you have no idea what is causing the problem? Enter the WordPress debug system. Using this feature of WordPress we can track what is causing us our problems.

We can enable debugging so the errors being thrown by your WordPress site are output to the screen. This then allows you to diagnose what the problem is.

Another feature of the WordPress debugging system is the ability to log those bugs. Imagine you are having an intermittent bug, enable logging and capture the bug when it happens. Rather than throwing the errors to the screen, you can save them to a log for later review.

In this video I’ll show you how to enable debugging via FTP, an FTP plugin (hint this won’t work when your site is down) and via cPanel or the file manager on your hosting.

The log your generate can become huge very quickly and contains lots of sensitive information a hacker could use to exploit your site, so remember to disable this feature and remove all log files once you are done.

Video – How To Enable Debugging On Your WordPress Site

Code

Here’s the code I added to wp-config.php. This system file is located in the root of your site’s file system.

The log file will be saved into the file /wp-content/debug.log

// Enable WP_DEBUG mode
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );

// Enable Debug logging to the /wp-content/debug.log file
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );

// Disable display of errors and warnings
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );
@ini_set( 'display_errors', 0 );

Wrap Up – How To Enable Debugging On Your WordPress Site

Hopefully this post and video have shown you how to enable debugging on your site to find out what is causing that problem.

No how to fix that problem is another thing altogether, if you need help fixing a crashed WordPress site why not hire me.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash