"Internal Server Error" or HTTP 500 in WordPress Print

What you're seeing

Your site shows Internal Server Error, or HTTP Error 500, or a page from the server saying something went wrong and to contact the administrator. Like the white screen, it is a wall with no detail, and like the white screen, it usually looks far worse than it is.

The name is honest about one thing: the error is on the server's side of things, not your browser's. Refreshing rarely helps, because the problem is waiting on the server, not in your connection.

What causes it

• A corrupted .htaccess file, the small configuration file that controls how your site's addresses work. This is the single most common cause with WordPress, and often the easiest to fix.
• A plugin or theme error serious enough to stop the server responding at all.
• The site running out of memory.
• A corrupted core file, occasionally, after a failed update or upload.

What you can safely try yourself

1. Reload once, then stop refreshing. A genuine one-off blip will clear on a single reload. If it does not, hammering refresh achieves nothing, the cause is on the server and needs addressing, not retrying.
2. Think about what changed just before. An update, a new plugin, an edit to a settings file, a change to how your links are structured? The last change is the usual suspect.
3. If you can still reach wp-admin, try deactivating your plugins, one at a time, as our article on deactivating plugins describes. If the error clears when a particular plugin goes off, you have found it.
4. Regenerate your permalinks, if you can reach the admin area. Go to Settings, then Permalinks, and simply click Save Changes without altering anything. This rebuilds the .htaccess file cleanly, and because a broken .htaccess is the most common cause, this harmless-looking step fixes this error more often than any other single thing you can do yourself.

Where the safe steps end

If you cannot reach wp-admin, the remaining fixes, editing or renaming the .htaccess file directly, raising the memory limit in the configuration, replacing core WordPress files, all happen over the file system and touch files that break the whole site if handled wrongly. That is our territory, not because you could not learn it, but because the downside of a slip is steep and we do this daily.

Hand it to us when

The permalink and plugin steps have not helped, or you cannot reach wp-admin to try them. Open a support ticket with your domain and what changed just before. We can read the server's error logs, which record exactly what caused the 500 even though the page in front of you does not, and fix it at the source. The error that looks like a blank wall to you is usually a single named line in the log to us.

Good to know

The reason this error hides its cause is that the detail lives in the server's error log rather than on the page, which is sensible, since visitors should never see raw server errors, but unhelpful when the visitor is you. That log is the first thing we look at, and it turns a mystery into a specific fix in moments. If 500 errors keep returning, it usually points at a plugin behaving badly or a memory limit set too low, both of which we can resolve properly so the error stops recurring rather than you meeting it again after the next update.