WordPress dashboard not displaying after upgrade

  • Hello!

    For our website, we have both a staging site and the live site. There were a few problems with our (3rd party) theme on the site which I fixed on the staging site and then moved over to the live site. Moving the changes over to the live site was simply replacing the live site’s wp-content folder with that of the staging site.

    After that I upgraded the WordPress version on the staging site, from 5.2.4 to 5.6, no problems at all there! But when doing this on the live site all the styling on the backend (WordPress Dashboard) is completely gone.

    When disabling the current custom theme in the file manager for the live site, the backend is usable again. But I’m really not sure how this could be considering the sites are copies with the exact same wp-content folder (and therefore the same plugins & themes).

    The debug.log gives nothing about this (previously there were PHP warnings, but these were all fixed before upgrading).

    Does anyone have any idea on how to go about fixing this or what could possibly be causing the error?

    Many thanks!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Try manually resetting your plugins (no Dashboard access required). If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.

    If that does not resolve the issue, access your server via SFTP or FTP, or a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel (consult your hosting provider’s documentation for specifics on these), 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 aidanww

    (@aidanww)

    Hi James,

    Thanks for that! I have already (via my hosting account’s control panel file manager) tried both of these prior to raising this issue and found that disabling the active theme fixes this. After doing this I was able to restore my WordPress version back to 5.2.4 and I then reactivated the theme (in order to have a working website). But I’d still like to use 5.6, and my staging site (which is a clone of the live site) is able to do this perfectly fine.

    Hope this all makes sense!

    Many thanks,
    Aidan

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    In that case, you’ll need to report the issue to your theme’s support.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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