Topic
Fixes for the errors that take a WordPress site down.
Troubleshooting
At least four different things display something that looks like your site title, and Settings, General only controls one of them. Work out which one you are staring at and the fix takes a minute.
Troubleshooting
Orphaned content means two completely different things — pages nothing links to, and database rows whose parent is gone. Work out which one you have before you fix anything, because the two repairs share nothing.
Troubleshooting
A canonical tag is a hint about which duplicate is the master copy, not an instruction. Most canonical problems in WordPress are really URL problems that the tag was asked to paper over.
Troubleshooting
Every active plugin runs in the same PHP process, the same hook system and the same page of JavaScript. Conflicts are collisions in that shared space, and the collision type tells you which fix will hold.
Troubleshooting
"wp-admin is broken" is four unrelated faults wearing the same URL. The symptom you see — blank, redirect, 403 or 404 — tells you which one you have before you change anything.
Troubleshooting
Half of these reports are not faults at all. WooCommerce hides a tab that has nothing to display, so the first question is never why the tab broke but whether it had any reason to appear.
Troubleshooting
WooCommerce Analytics does not read your orders. It reads a set of lookup tables built from them, and the historical import is what fills those tables — which is why a stalled import and wrong report figures are the same problem seen from two angles.
Troubleshooting
The database update is a background queue, not a button that does work while you watch it. Nearly every stuck update is a scheduled action that never got processed, and the fix is upstream of WooCommerce entirely.
Troubleshooting
Get back in first, then fix the delivery. The reset email failing is almost never about the account — it is the site's mail configuration, and it affects every other notification too.
Troubleshooting
A loopback is WordPress calling itself over HTTP. When it fails, cron, the editor's recovery features and the plugin editor stop working — and the cause is nearly always DNS, auth or a firewall.
Troubleshooting
Horizontal scrolling, tiny text and a broken menu each have a specific cause. Reproduce the problem in a device emulator, find the element that overflows, and fix the rule.
Troubleshooting
The browser stops painting while it fetches stylesheets and head scripts. Load less CSS, defer scripts, and stop third-party tags from sitting in the critical path.