that WordPress is easy to install and use, it is open source, it supports lots of customization, has thousands of Themes & plugins and has a very large developer community. Other good thing about WordPress is that even the non-technical users can use it to create blog/website and to update/publish the contents on it. Obviously you have to use social media for promotion, optimize the content for search engine crawler, and build relevant links to increase your website’s ranking in search results.
Other than these, you have to also make sure that your WordPress website is free from any technical glitches and errors in order to get higher rank in search results. If something is wrong with the technological base, then the entire WordPress framework and the website will be in trouble. Hence we can say that if you won’t pay attention to the WordPress website errors then it can harm your website’s ranking in the search engines.
Now I will tell you about the top WordPress errors which no one likes including the search engines and the users and you should prevent them from happening at any cost as they affect your site’s SEO.
500 Internal Server Error
This is a server related error and is displayed when there is some trouble with your server. If this error comes then you have to find out whether it is due to some technical glitch in the code or some fault in the hardware itself. Check to see if you are facing this problem even with static files such as image, video, CSS and PDF. In these cases, it is definitely a hardware problem but if it is showing this error permanently, then it could be due to a server misconfiguration. Sitemap going down on a regular basis also means that it is a static XML file itself. You should also check for corrupt .htaccess file, exhausted PHP memory limit, and re-uploading core file in the ‘wp-admin’ and ‘wp-includes’ folder from another fresh WordPress install.
404 Not Found Error
People face this problem so many times due to many reasons. Even a slight misspelling can cause this error and it can also happen when there is an inbound link to a deleted page. Facing this error is not a good user experience and certainly it is not good for its ranking. This error comes mainly due to two reasons: - broken links or non-existent pages. You can use some tools like Xenu to crawl the web and fix the broken links but if pages are your problem then you can either redirect them to some other related page/homepage and/or restore them if they were removed by chance. 404 Errors are recorded in the Google database for pages with duplicate or thin content and Google doesn’t index them on its search engine.
Crawl Errors
Developers generally block the bots of some crawlers like ahref to avoid your competitors spying upon you but sometimes search engine crawling bots too are unable to find their path through the WordPress website. These things are reported in the crawl errors section of your Search Console and are divided into site errors and URL errors. Hence you can prioritize them and deal with them as required on an urgent basis. Site errors can also be caused due to many reasons like it can be due to DNS timeout or DNS lookup issue or it can also be due to an overloaded server and long response time or a misconfigured robots.txt or .htaccess file. Based on these information, you can fix them. URL errors mainly occur by 404 errors as we have discussed in second step. Other than that, they can also happen due to Google facing issues in JavaScript, redirects etc. or due to access being denied to Googlebot, mostly when page only allows authorized access.
502 Bad Gateway
As the name says this error of bad gateway happens due to an invalid response to a query. Sometimes it happens due to a technical glitch in the server or a network issue and sometimes it happens due to an issue such as conflict within your WordPress plugins etc. There are many things which you can initially do such as reloading your website, clearing browser cache, temporarily disabling any CDN or firewall which you have. If nothing works, then you can try to update your WordPress theme and plugins or try deactivating them and check if it resolves the error. If you still face the issue, then you should contact your hosting provider.
504 Gateway Timeout
This is an example of delayed response which happens when a server times out while waiting for a response from another server. This can happen due to many reasons such as an overloaded server which is facing heavy traffic and more. You will not get the exactly the same error code as these error codes can be many however ultimately they all means the same. If the site is down for only about 10-30 minutes, then it is not a matter of worry as search engine crawlers will deliver it from the cache and wait for your website to get restored. But if it takes a long time such as more than 5-6 hours, then the crawlers bot may think that it doesn’t exist anymore and remove it from results or even deindex it altogether. To resolve this error, you can try disabling the CDN/Firewall that you have and deactivate your plugins to clear conflict if there is any. This error can also occur due to some DDoS or spam attack which you can prevent by installing a good security plugin to your WordPress website. That means, the most common reasons for this error are always server related issues. Most of these server issues happen due to heavy traffic overloading on websites, mainly because of poorly configured or badly optimized site server. There are some more issues which can cause this error like firewall issues, network connectivity, slow server, fewer PHP workers, HTTP timeouts etc. You can resolve these issues by contacting your host.
Conclusion
We have just discussed the top WordPress errors which users may face while accessing your WordPress website. These errors can negatively affect your Website’s SEO hence you should take the precautionary steps as we have discussed above so that these things never happen again. If you maintain your website regularly then there are very less chances that it will run into some technical error. Most of these errors will affect us hugely only if we let them keep on happening and we do not fix them the in the early stage when we see them or notice them at the first time.
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