Are you having an issue with your website refreshing and redirecting on the login page? If so I’ll walk you through several different things to check on your website to get it fixed and get your site back up and running quickly.
Now since we’ll be working with your website you want to make sure that you get a backup of your site first you can do that through your hosting provider. You’ll also want to make sure that you have an FTP client on your computer so that you can access your website from the backend. I’ll be using FileZilla for this article, this is how it looks when you’re trying to log in but it refreshes or redirects and that’s a pretty scary feeling because you feel like you can’t get to your website.
So let’s go through different things that you can do to fix this. One of the easiest things to try is to clear your browser cookies and the cache. In Chrome you’ll just have to scroll down to Settings,
Advanced,
scroll all the way down to Clear browsing data,
make sure you check everything you want to do cookies and cache from the beginning of time clear that out
and see if that works for you. Once you clear that, simply go to your website and try it again. If this is still happening then we’ll move on to the next one.
The next step that we want to try is to deactivate all of the plugins on the website. To do that we’ll need to use our FTP client. I’ll bring in my FileZilla, you can get your FTP credentials from your hosting company.
Once you’ve logged in we’re looking for the wp-content folder
and we’re looking for plugins.
We want to right click on this and we need to rename it.
You can rename it to anything that you want we just need to make sure that it’s no longer called plugins.
Head back over to your website and see if you can log in. If you can then there’s a problem with one of your plugins and you’ll want to activate each one to see which one’s the problem.
If you’re still getting the issue the next step is to do the same thing but for your themes folder. So we’ll head back over to our FTP client and this time go into the themes folder
and you’ll want to change the theme folder name to something else. I know that my website is using the twentyseventeen,
so I’ll rename that.
When you rename it then your website will default to the default WordPress theme. Again head back over to your login and see if you can login. If you can log in then that means that it’s something corrupted with your theme and you’ll either want to upload a fresh version of your theme or maybe choose a new theme. If you are still seeing this issue then the next step that I recommend is let’s head over to our FTP again and this time we need to delete the htaccess file. The htaccess file will be in the top level so you’ll want to be able to see your wp-content your wp-admin folders so you’ll want to scroll down until you see htaccess.
All you have to do with that is right click
and delete it
and before you try logging back in go ahead
and reset your folders back to what they were called.
So I reset my «plugins_back» to «plugins»,
log back into my themes and reset my themes folder back to what it was.
If you can log in with that make sure you head over to your Settings, Permalinks area,
scroll all the way down and simply click Save Changes that will recreate the htaccess for you.
If you’re still having this issue or if you still can’t log in, then let’s try one more thing. The final thing that we’ll want to do is try and update the site URL in our wp-config file. To do that we’ll pull up our FTP again and you want to be at the top level,
we’ll scroll down until we find wp-config,
download that locally.
Once that’s downloaded locally
you’ll want to open that up with a text editor. Once that’s open you want to scroll all the way down and we’re adding two lines of code.
From this you want to change this area to your actual website and if it’s www make sure you put that in there as well. Once you save that
and let’s go ahead and upload that back,
we’ll overwrite it
and that actually should fix the problem and hopefully one of those steps allowed you to get back into your website. Did you learn something from today’s article?