400/403 Error on one post, site is lagging after only being ‘live’ one day

So you have two issues: the 403 Error and the slowness.

First of all, have you tried changing the permalink of the post that’s giving you difficulty? Maybe the permalink is a conflict with something? The permalink is the URL of the post, and it’s usually set right below the title, pulling from the title. You can click edit next to it and edit the permalink.

If that doesn’t work try deactivating all your plugins and trying to publish the post. It could be a plugin conflict.

It could also be a corruption in your .htaccess file. This is a powerful file that can cause big issues for your site if corrupted or if wrong settings are added. It’s found in the “root” of you site, the same directory where you will find wp-admin & wp-content. You could try changing the name of .htaccess to “.htaccess-bak” — this will render it non-functional for your site — and then going to Settings — Permalinks and resaving your choice there (this controls how your urls for your site are automatically generated). Looking at your site, you will want to re-choose Post titles. WP will automatically regenerate an .htaccess.

Do fix the 403 issue before trying to deal with site slowness!

You can test the load time of your site here: https://tools.pingdom.com. You could test each of your posts so far to see if any one of them is causing the slowness. This could be due to an extra large image file, for instance.

You might also want to look for a caching plugin to help with site speed. For instance, https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-super-cache/.

The site could also be slow because it’s getting a lot of traffic. (200K twitter followers is a lot of potential traffic!). Traffic can cause site slowness if you are on a low-cost shared hosting plan that doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth to help accommodate the traffic. Check your analytics to see if that’s potentially an issue.

Thank you for responding. I called my hosting service about the slowness, and they detected that because of my husband’s well-meaning intentions, my site was unable to handle the load. They fixed it and all went well for a day (the post seemed fixed, people were able to access it and read and comment). Fast forward to this afternoon, and that SAME single post is giving the same error codes. I pulled it and put it into draft mode AGAIN, and checked all of the things you mentioned. Nothing seems out of place, and it’s not working. I removed the image, in case it was corrupt (a free image download off of Pexels). Nothing. It only affects this one post. All of my other posts are working fine. Its my second highest read article on my site and now it’s sitting in draft again. What else can I do? I’ve copied the text, deleted the post and then created a new post, and the same thing keeps happening.

Can you post the url for the post that is causing you issues? (if needed, you can just include the part after cherries.com)

Also, are you getting a 400 error or a 403 error?

I deleted the post again, changed the title, changed the image, and then reposted it on a new page. So far, so good. I’m not sure why his issue would just be with one post of the five I have. I wrote them all the same way, didn’t change any of the settings between them. It’s almost as if someone doesn’t like what I had to say (haha). I’ll add to this thread if the problem returns. And it is both errors. The 400 Error is at the top of the page, and here’s a sentence that states “additionally, a 403 Error…”