dashboard not loading properly

Probably a bad plugin. Decativate them all and reactivate one by one, test in between.

Thank you–I’m trying, but when I click ‘deactivate’ I wait a long time then get “the connection was reset.” Somebody else was advised to change the name of the plugins folder on the server–would that work? Could I just change the name of each plugin folder, one by one?

Either way will work. Plgins that no longer exists at the original path are deactivated, otherwise WordPress would fail to load.

You were right! Thank you so much, what a relief.

I deactivated the most likely culprits and now everything works. But these were my site counters–statcounter and google analytics. I used the automatic installation. Is there a chance they’d be OK if I pasted in the code myself?

Don’t paste, even though I’m not sure what you mean by that in this context. It will not help. If a plugin doesn’t work as expected, or harms other software, this is something you have to have to bring to the plugin author and may be get an update. In the mean time, don’t use that specific plugin.

Lesson: Like when having big trouble with an OS, like Windows, first try to restart it, then uninstall the latest installed program. When having trouble with your WordPress installation, which almost always is a mix of core WordPress, a theme and bunch of plugins from different authors, first deactivate all plugins at any cost in labour, set permalinks to default, then switch to default theme. In nine out of ten (guessed) serious situations the problem then disappears and you can start a quiet investigation under conditions where the most important things actually work and you are in control (log in, view site). When the cause is clearly identified down to package level, and authors informed, the problem is almost already, or practically, solved.

And when informing a plugin author about a problem, or asking for help in a forum, always include your WP version, PHP version, theme, permalink settings and eventually what active plugin the problem seems to interfere with.

Don’t paste, even though I’m not sure what you mean by that in this context. It will not help.

You can also add these counters by getting the site to generate code for you then paste it into the footer of the page. That worked in my old version of WP and it’s the way I put counters on my regular website. It doesn’t seem the same as actually installing a plugin.

Thanks for all this advice–I’m learning as I go.