WP Didn’t Save

Open the post’s edit screen and access the right sidebar meta boxes (via gear icon). Follow the Revisions link. On the next screen you can navigate to all available revisions that have been saved. Hopefully the content you are looking for is in there somewhere. The view presented in revisions is the code view, so you’ll need to look past all the HTML code to see actual content.

Doesn’t solve how saving appears to not work, but hopefully you can regain lost work. If you find your content in a revision, try restoring that revision as current. Also save whatever you find to outside of WP via copy/paste until proper saving can be resolved. One possibility is due to caching, front end content may not reflect the latest back end changes. But you should certainly see the latest version when you open the editor.

Thank you so much. I have found the missing pages. BUT… Another problem developed at the same time. For many of the posts (Chapters) on my site, I get a message saying “Safari can’t open the page.” This happens on many of the chapters. I can try again and they may or may not open. This has never happened before. Sometimes, I can’t even log in as admin. My web host is fatcow.com. They – unsuccessfully – tried to find the text and photos I had added in Drafts. This problem has only just started – only after I turned to them for help. I’ve tried going to the site using different devices – laptop, iPad, iPhone. Same result. It doesn’t matter if I’m using WiFi or cellular data. Half the pages won’t open.
Any suggestions?

I’m glad you found the missing data! Intermittent issues are hard to diagnose. First be sure WP, your theme, and all plugins are updated to the latest versions. That alone might correct the problem.

If you still encounter difficulty, install and activate the Health Check and Troubleshooting plugin. I assume you’ve already looked at the built-in health check page and there’s nothing unusual. The plugin health check does nothing different. What you want is its troubleshooting mode. In this mode, your troubleshooting effort only affect your view. Everyone else sees the normal site. Invoke troubleshooting mode. This will switch to the latest twenty* default theme and deactivate all other plugins.

Decide if there is trouble in this state or not. If there’s still trouble, try reinstalling WP from the updates admin screen (after exiting troubleshooting mode). If all seems fine, narrow down the root cause by restoring your theme from the admin bar troubleshooting item. Does the trouble return? Restore your plugins the same way, checking for trouble after each one.

Don’t forget to exit troubleshooting mode when you’re finished diagnosing the trouble ?? If all of that doesn’t reveal anything, the problem is likely related to server configuration, resources, and performance. Fatcow tech support would need to help you resolve server issues. It may be as simple as altering modSecurity settings.

It’s now worse! I can’t sign in to Admin. I’ve tried Safari, Chrome, and Firefox – using Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Always a message saying “Can’t connect to server.” So the problem is not the Safari browser – as my host, FatCow, tried to say. In addition, www.ads-software.com won’t accept my password. I keep ordering a new one (about a dozen, so far) but each time I enter the new one, the login box jumps around a bit indicating a non-valid password. I try again and order a new password. It arrives in Mail – but doesn’t work. It seems that minute by minute the problems I am experiencing are getting worse. By some miracle, I was able to logon to the Forum – but if you don’t get a “thank you” from me it’s because I couldn’t logon. I’m pulling my hair out. I have written to FatCow but am not getting a response. I want to make sure my Theme and plugins are up-to-date – but since I can’t get onto Admin, I can’t even do that! Needless to say, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I’m sorry to hear of your continued trouble. The statement “www.ads-software.com won’t accept my password” gives me pause. You’re posting replies here so that’s not really accurate. Usually when people say that, they mean wordpress.com. But if you’re hosted with FatCow, that can’t be right either. I guess they mean your WP site from www.ads-software.com isn’t accepting passwords. But that’s not 100% right either, password failure on a WP site yields a message along the lines of “Error: The password you entered for the username foo is incorrect.” Not “Cannot connect to server”.

The password you use here at www.ads-software.com has nothing to do with your WP site hosted at FatCow. Resetting your www.ads-software.com password will not help you with accessing your own site. You log in to your site at yourdomain.com/wp-login.php, substituting in your actual domain name of course. If you still get a cannot connect to server error for that login screen, then it’s not a WP issue, there’s an issue with FatCow server configuration. However, I just checked and the login screen for your site is currently accessible. If you still get such a connection error, try flushing your browser cache and clearing any cookies set by your site.

If you are able to get the login screen but your password doesn’t work there, there are a number of possible workarounds. The simplest is to follow the “Lost your password?” link on the login screen. After providing a name or email, your site will send you an email message (to the address registered for your username) with a link. By following the link, you’ll be able to enter a new password. Be sure you’re on your site’s login screen and not that of www.ads-software.com. If for any reason that isn’t working for you, other possible workarounds are listed here:

Resetting Your Password

Choose one that seems most appealing and understandable to you. You will be unlikely to have WP CLI, but any of the other methods listed will work.

BTW, there are ways to disable plugins and your current theme without logging in. It’s via FTP or your hosting’s file manager. That and other login trouble strategies are presented here:

Login Trouble

Don’t take any of these measures until you’re sure that no password reset method is working.

Thank you for spending so much time trying to help me with my website. I have tried some of the suggestions – without much success. I have updated all plugins and my theme. The only exception is a suggested addition to my theme – Superb Helper. But it says I need a newer version of PHP. Going there, I find a warning about contacting my host – FatCow. It sounded like I might get myself in more trouble so I didn’t go any further. Unused plugins have been deleted. Plugins in use and my theme have been updated as much as possible.

As for logging in… I kept clicking on Lost Password and kept receiving a link with a new one. But I kept getting the vibrating login screen – password not valid! I did a Google search and found I could go directly to the Forum page without going to my Dashboard. It accepted my password. Don’t ask me how, but I was eventually able to login.

In spite of cleaning things up as best I can, it is still difficult to view my site – using various devices and various browsers. I sometimes get a variation (depending on browser) of “Can’t open the page because the network connection was lost” or “Can’t connect to server.” Usually, if I refresh the page, it loads. There doesn’t seem to be any consistency. A page that didn’t load yesterday will load today and one that did load yesterday won’t load today.

I wrote my web-hosting company, FatCow, and this was their response:

[redacted — see below for response]
==========
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I will be travelling for awhile. While I will logon when I have WiFi access, please don’t be disappointed if I don’t reply right away. I am grateful for all the help – and will respond as promptly as I can. But for the next while, it might not be immediately.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by bcworkz.

Sorry, the FatCow letter didn’t transfer very well. I will attempt to transcribe it instead of using Copy/Paste.

From FatCow:

I have checked the emails sent and understand that you are unable to access the WordPress admin dashboard and a few of the pages with Safari, Google Chrome, or Firefox browsers. I have checked the website and accessed a few pages and they are all working as expected. Additionally, I attempted to access the same pages again and I’m afraid I could not see any errors from here.

I checked the WordPress admin dashboard and entered it using our support login credentials and it was showing the jumbled layout of the dashboard or it was not displaying as expected. Upon further investigation, I found the ‘.htaccess’ file of the website is causing this issue. Rest assured, I have disabled it by renaming the file to ‘htaccess.txt’ and created a new ‘.htaccess’ file with default code. This fixed the issue with the WordPress admin dashboard and it is displaying as expected now. Here is a screenshot of it:

(Screenshot. Won’t copy.)

I checked the account details and history and could not see any changes made to your account or website from our end by previous support representatives. I’m afraid that the WordPress admin dashboard login is not working on your end. It appears to be a caching issue on the browsers or the network level which caused to load the same error page that was stored in the cache of previous attempts.

To avoid this, please try accessing it after clearing the browser cache and cookies of your browser or in incognito mode of the browser or in other computers. Here is the link to know more about clearing the browser cache and cookies: https://www.fatcow.com/help/article/clearing-a-web-browsers-cache . A heads up, clearing browser cache, and cookies will erase all the previous history of websites you have visited in that browser.

Additionally, it is advisable to give it a try with different Internet Service Providers ( ISP ) and let us know how it is working. If the issue still persists, it is advisable to reply back to this email with the details you see at https://www1.fatcow.com/browser/ . We have already tried the steps given to replicate the errors and could not find the errors here. This is the reason if there is anything else we need to try or click on the website page to see the errors, please let us know so that we can try the same and check if we get the same errors. If you see any new error messages, please let us know.

When you copy/paste anything more than a couple lines into a reply, the forum software assumes you are pasting code. If pasting in pre-typed text is part of your workflow, this “feature” is really annoying. After every paste you have to go back and remove the backticks that demarcate code. Thanks for re-posting. FYI I went back and removed the original pasted content, just to clean things up and reduce the data volume in the forums some minuscule amount.

An .htaccess issue would definitely cause WP issues in most cases. It sounds like things are more stable now, so one of the password reset methods I linked to earlier should work for you.

Browsers caching and improperly displaying error pages can certainly confuse the issue. There should be a way to clear cookies for your site and no others, but how is browser dependent and can be rather obscure. The clear everything option is generally much more obvious. If you suspect caching or cookies are confusing things, using incognito mode to recheck is usually the easiest option, or using a different browser that you don’t normally use.

If you’re travelling, it could be an opportunity to try different ISPs. Be wary of shared Wi-Fi connections though. Be sure to use the https:// versions of your site’s URLs. The insecure https:// version sends passwords in plain text, https:// encodes everything before sending.

Safe travels!

Thank you so much. My site, once again, appears to be working. I really appreciate the time you took to go through my lengthy questions – and answering them. I will let you know if anything changes but it looks like all is good. I will now try adding the paragraphs and photos that got lost even though I saved them. Your help allowed me to recover them. Hopefully, they will load and save without the same problem recurring. After all, that is what I was doing when everything went wrong. Fingers crossed! Thanks again for everything.

You’re welcome! FatCow support is who found the root cause. I only served as a font of knowledge ?? I don’t see how adding content to your site would have corrupted the .htaccess file, so adding content now should be quite safe to do. I think the adding of content and the file getting corrupted were only a coincidence, no causality.