Homepage not found

  • I’m having some difficulty with my website. I’ve only recently published and everything was working fine, then somebody (ahem, boss) decided to add a downloads page, managed to add an index.html in the root, so the whole site was just displaying plain html downloads page. I’ve removed that, but now the homepage gives a WordPress “Page not found”, but the site is loading.

    All the other pages work fine.

    It’s using Zerif Lite theme with modifications in a child theme.

    The weird thing is that when I am logged into WordPress admin, I can see and edit the homepage just fine.

    Anyone have any pointers on what may be going on?

    Thanks ??

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Firstly, the default WordPress homepage in the root directory is typically “index.php” not “index.html”. The problem is probably that you accidentally deleted the wrong file. It is, however, very difficult for us to help you because hosting environments vary.

    I saw an Nginx server when I looked but it responded like you have htaccess so I’m going to guess that Nginx is a proxy server.

    I’m a little confused by the Index page not showing up but then thinking if that’s a proxy and the page it thinks should be the index is now gone then the proxy is returning a 404 error in its place.

    So a cache flush is in order and I hope that will reach into the proxy box and force it to flush or else you’ll want to ask the web host for help.

    @ultrablogger

    They placed an index.html file in the webroot to get to a download page they created.

    The server does act as the index.php is there now except when looking for the webroot page by itself… I think their proxy might be poisoned slightly by the now missing index.html file.

    Thread Starter techgreyeye

    (@techgreyeye)

    @ultrablogger yes, I removed the index.html, and it’s definitely loading the index.php because the WordPress site itself is loading, just not loading the custom homepage and giving the 404 message from within WordPress, not from the webserver.

    @jnashhawkins I will see about proxy flush.

    Thanks for the tips both ??

    @techgreyeye It’s probably because both of the files are ‘index’ files. When someone visits your website, the web server looks for an ‘index’ file in the root directory to display to the user. Having two ‘index’ files is problematic, because the server doesn’t know what one to display. You could add your custom ‘index.html’ file to a subdirectory. So it’s ‘[yourdomain.tld]/downloads/index.html’. You could remove ‘index.php’ and just have your ‘index.html’ in the root directory, but that would mess up WordPress, so it’s not recommended.

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by ultrablogger.
    • This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by ultrablogger.
    • This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by ultrablogger.
    Thread Starter techgreyeye

    (@techgreyeye)

    @ultrablogger yes, I removed the index.html but had the 404 error from within wordpress.

    I have solved this now though.

    Within WordPress, the Home page had got unpublished. I’m assuming this is some sort of reaction wordpress had to the presence of an index.html in the root, but I don’t want to take the risk messing with it again and taking the site offline.

    To resolve, I republished the homepage and now everything is working again.

    Thanks for the help ??

    @techgreyeye You’re welcome ??. Yes, just remember in future that you have to choose between your own code and a CMS like WordPress. They don’t work together. ??

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • The topic ‘Homepage not found’ is closed to new replies.