Is WordPress.org sufficiently robust?

Mr Badger · 21 Jun 2017 at 17:22

I was planning to migrate a fairly large website onto WordPress.org and a few months ago I made all the pages and menus and tried out a bunch of themes. Hadn't got to the point of replicating all the content and going live though. I haven't done anything to it since and it was still working until a few weeks ago. Now for no apparent reason it's completely broken and none of the pages show up. I've searched for solutions and so far none have worked. What I have found is a lot of examples of other people asking for help with broken WordPress sites.

So am I just very unlucky or is WordPress not really robust enough to rely on?

touch · 21 Jun 2017 at 17:29

When you say none of the pages show up, do you mean your menus are empty with no links to click on for the pages or you get errors/404s when clicking on each page?

One of the common problems in cases of moving between hosts is differences in using the web.config file on windows hosts and the .htaccess file on linux hosts. If you go to settings>permalinks and click save changes (you dont actually have to change anything) it'll recreate whichever config/htaccess file it needs.

Mr Badger · 21 Jun 2017 at 17:53

All I get now is the following:

The website cannot display the page
HTTP 500

Most likely causes:

The website is under maintenance.
The website has a programming error.

gord · 22 Jun 2017 at 09:10

Wordpress itself is very robust and used by some fairly large institutions. Just the other day I noticed that http://www.silverstone.co.uk/ is built on Wordpress.

What's not robust are theme and plugin developers. Stick to the ones developed by proper companies, with proper support.

peterwalkley · 22 Jun 2017 at 09:28

Check your security settings. Wordpress sites seem to be constantly probed by hackers and script kiddies looking for anything they can take over.

Mr Badger · 22 Jun 2017 at 16:03

gord said:
Wordpress itself is very robust and used by some fairly large institutions. Just the other day I noticed that http://www.silverstone.co.uk/ is built on Wordpress.

Maybe it's just personal taste but I don't think much of that design!

gord said:
What's not robust are theme and plugin developers. Stick to the ones developed by proper companies, with proper support.

Any tips for a good robust magazine type theme please? Needs to be able to cope with numerous pages and meus and ideally I would like other editors/admins to be able to post articles to particular pages, rather than all the posts appearing on the same page.

gord · 22 Jun 2017 at 17:13

Mr Badger said:
Any tips for a good robust magazine type theme please? Needs to be able to cope with numerous pages and meus and ideally I would like other editors/admins to be able to post articles to particular pages, rather than all the posts appearing on the same page.

I buy from themeforest usually.

Check out the top ones in this link, these are the best selling Wordpress themes on the site. Lots of sales means lots of people testing the theme and typically professional support. https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress/blog-magazine?utf8=✓&referrer=search&view=list&sort=sales