wp-load.php file crashing my website

Okay, this is way off the wall but something I used to do on the junky old computers I could afford at the time.

If that same file is actually messing up repeatedly…

Rename the present empty file to something odd by adding 1234 or bak to that file then upload just that file again with the proper name.

What that does is leaves the old broken file alone and adds the new file in the next available spot. If the hard drive was failing slightly and causing that problem the new file will hopefully be good from then on.

If the host server’s hard drive array is broken then the problem will get worse over time but if it’s just a flaky spot affecting that single file then you might find things are fine after that.

Some people might tell you that’s silly with raid arrays and NFS file systems and such but ‘go old school’ once in a while to save some time. It’s only a few seconds to do this using FTP. Just a few more using file manager.

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If instead something is going amok in the programming I’d suspect my plugins and possibly the theme unless you changed something your self in the WordPress core.

The quick test is to rename your plugins directory temporarily with a look at the MU plugins if you have any there. Plugins are where most programmatic problems show up…

Themes are the second cause and most of that can be narrowed down to the functions file… The question there is did you ever put any custom code into functions.php.

The quick test there is to swap out temporarily for a default theme like my favorite… Twenty Thirteen or one of the other ‘Twenty’ series themes.

Let us know if you need more info or the steps above doesn’t uncover the problem…

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by JNashHawkins.

Constantly have to upload the wp-load.php file to get the website to load, have disabled all plugins and is still doing it.

As soon as I make a change in the admin this is the error I get :

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function nocache_headers() in /customers/c/1/7/veganantics.co.uk/httpd.www/wp-admin/admin.php:36 Stack trace: #0 {main} thrown in /customers/c/1/7/veganantics.co.uk/httpd.www/wp-admin/admin.php on line 36

and this is the error I get front end:

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function wp() in /customers/c/1/7/veganantics.co.uk/httpd.www/wp-blog-header.php:16 Stack trace: #0 /customers/c/1/7/veganantics.co.uk/httpd.www/index.php(17): require() #1 {main} thrown in /customers/c/1/7/veganantics.co.uk/httpd.www/wp-blog-header.php on line 16

I mean I just don’t get it, literally any change at all and the website causes those errors, plus, even if I just upload the wp-load.php file and don’t touch anything, within 5 minutes the website causes the same errors, like something is modifying the file itself! I have also tried changing the permissions to 444 on the file and it still does it!!

There must be a genius out there? The hosting provider just asked me to re-upload the wordpress files manually AGAIN and I have just done so only for the problem to happen again, the host said I had out of date files which makes no sense, I just uploaded the latest version?

Same problem!
wp-load.php 0 bytes. Re-upload and after 2 minutes again 0 bytes then Fatal error.
I think there is a malware but nobody help me.

Hi, I have found the fix, based off yatich his reply in a different thread.
First of all get a brand new wp-load.php
https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/master/wp-load.php

Replace that with your current wp-load.php, then go into your cpanel, and go to files.
Now inside files you select wp-load.php and change the permission from 644 to 444.
If you are using directphpmyadmin make sure you select wp-load.php and DESELECT “move to trash” and type 444 in the number slot and click change permission.

This should fix your issue.