Changing Theme Resulted In Critical Error. How To Change Back?

  • Resolved cvr2006

    (@cvr2006)


    3 years, 9 months ago

    I changed the Theme of my website.
    Now, we can’t reach any page on the website, including every page in the dashboard. Instead, we see “There has been a critical error on this website.”

    My first thought was to immediately change my Theme back to what I was using before. However, I don’t have the ability to go to the page in the dashboard to change Themes.

    I want to go back to the old Theme. What should I do?

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  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    However, I don’t have the ability to go to the page in the dashboard

    You need to!

    Access your server via SFTP or FTP, or a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel, navigate to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your currently active theme. This will force the default theme to activate and hopefully rule-out a theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).

    Thread Starter cvr2006

    (@cvr2006)

    Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll just put in here what I sent my supervisor (who then condensed it and sent it to our clients):

    In an attempt to do some troubleshooting, I set the WordPress Theme to the default Theme. That’s when the site failed. No pages were accessible, not even the Dashboard.

    I changed the name of the directory of the Theme we ordinarily use for the website.
    I still couldn’t get to the Dashboard.
    I asked for help on the WordPress forums.
    I changed the name of the default WordPress Theme.
    Parts of the Dashboard were accessible, other parts were not (still couldn’t access the option to change Themes in the Dashboard). It appeared that WordPress simply reverts to another default Theme when you disable its first default Theme.
    I changed the name of all of the plugin directories. No effect. I changed them back.
    I changed the name of ALL the Theme directories.
    I got access to the Dashboard again.
    I used WordPress Dashboard to add new Theme “Twenty Thirteen” and activate it. Unsurprisingly, website looked funny, but didn’t care, just needed access to the Dashboard again. I got access to the Dashboard.
    I changed names of theme directories back to default names.
    I changed back to Theme were were using before this mess started.

    Resolved!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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