Why last night gave me a headache?
The headache begins
I installed a plugin the other day to help with a mailing list. 404 warnings start to appear on my website.
This plugin was not suitable for the theme I am using on my website. I had no idea at the time so went ahead and installed it.
This is why it gave me a headache last night?
Oops
It changed my permalink on my website and all pages and posts from http:// to https://. A permalink is what you see at the top of the pages, in any search engin like google or bing etc
The issues it created?
1: login to my website through the WA slow to non existent
2: google search console & bing webmaster not linking to my website - unable to read my information
3: my website in HTML format now
4: all social media sites ie twitter , fb and Pinterest have old permalink so won’t connect to my site if people click on any of the links. ?
Don’t panic & look for help!
I contacted the technical team
I message a fellow WA member who I knew could help, thank you smartketeer.
Go into google search console & bing webmaster and find out how to change everything to https://
What does this have to do with you ?
if you are here to learn from the training , to grow your website and business, then it does have something to do with you. As one day you may make a similar or even different mistake like this. You need to understand that WA is here to help and support you to sort out the problem.
If there is one lesson I want you to learn from my mistake is this
- before you add a new plug in or change anything major to do with your website , make sure you have backed your work up
That way if something goes wrong you can still go back to how things were before you made the changes.
Have I solved all the issues caused by this? no not yet it’s a work in progress :)
How much actuall damage has it done in terms of traffic to my website , who knows?
A winner never quits
I am just over 7 months here do I have two choices walk away or learn and carry on. I am still here and proud of what I have learned from this. What would you do?
If you have had similar learning curves like this or can give me some help as to what else I might need to fix this error please let me know.
All I wanted to do last night was work on a new blog but that never happened as this headache took over. That’s the nature of the beast when you aim to learn new things and grow as a person.
Stay positive and take action on your dreams and learn to love making those mistakes 👍
Who said it was always plain sailing?
As always thanks for reading 🙏
Recent Comments
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Great lesson for us all. I particularly like the message at the end to keep on going forward and learn from our mistakes. This is the same in most parts of life. It might indeed seem easier to give up but what happens then, you have to start all over again somewhere else right? Thanks for taking the time in your difficult situation to write this up for us all to learn.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I have been having nightmares about something like this happening. Phil1944 just posted about a plugin to do Backup and Restore so I installed it. That is too late to help you though. Have you tried any of the following plugins? "Broken Link Checker", "WP Broken Link Status Checker", "WordPress Broken Link Manager". All 3 are compatible with the current version of WordPress that we are using.
I am glad you are still here blogging about it. I have had the same issues too, when my plugins updated several of my pages disappeared and then I found it out in Google webmaster/analytics...managed to google and fix them, but it may be happening again because my bounce rate is high. I am not quitting though, still a lot to learn :)
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You will certainly run into roadblocks. You just have to figure out how to get around them. Sometimes it takes a few days. You just have to try all the options you can think of and then think of one more.
However, this successful removing of roadblocks is such a very important part of your learning experience...perhaps the very most, because you are forced to figure out a new way to do things before you can progress.
I don't like the roadblocks, but I know they are learning experiences in disguise.