How to Fix the Error Establishing a Database Connection in WordPress

Key Takeaways

is your site getting the era establishing a database connection in WordPress we'll keep watching I'll show you several different troubleshooting techniques that you can use to fix this problem when we had to do this for our site it took about 20 minutes so go ahead and give yourself a little bit of time to work through these you also want to make sure that you have an FTP client so that you can connect to your website from the back end you can get your login credentials from your hosting provider so this is what it will look like first thing you want to do is make sure that you get an error from the front end as well as the back end when you try and access your admin area if you get something like this then you'll want to try and repair the database to do that connect to your website with your FTP client scroll down and we're looking for our WP config file we want to download this locally and then you can open it with a text editor any text editor will do I have notepad plus plus so I'll use that you want to scroll all the way down to below that's all stop editing and start a new line and we want to paste this bit of code in there this will allow it to try and repair the database so we need to save that and upload it back to our site so go back to the FTP client click upload you want to overwrite this once you add that bit of code head over to this URL and click repair an optimized database and that should fix it if you're still getting the era establishing database connection like you see here then we'll move on to the next step the next thing we want to do is go back to our WP config file and we want to make sure that all of our information is correct specifically all of the database information once you verify that everything looks ok and if you've seen any issues that you've made changes to then go ahead and upload it and try it again if you still see the error then you can change your DB hose from localhost to the actual IP address that works for some people especially people who are running the local server environment so you can try that and then finally you want to check your web host my sequel server if your site gets inundated with a lot of traffic then basically your server just can't handle the requests so that might be what's happening as well this will require you to contact your support for your host and see if they can help you out with that once you've identified and fixed anything with you WP config file go back and see if it works again your site should come back up did you learn something from today's video if so subscribe to our YouTube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching