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It’s Sunday afternoon. I probably shouldn’t be thinking about my website, but… So I went to log in and do some work on it, & here’s what I got.

Not exactly what I had in mind. So now what?

There are several troubleshooting steps one generally takes when a situation like this arises. Since I’m writing this while the site is still broken, I’m going to just start following these, and it’ll be an adventure for all of us to see which one finally works. Let’s ride!

Because .htaccess files often contain instructions regarding redirects, and because our server has recently has some issues regarding DDOS attacks which necessitated modification of some .htaccess files, that’s where I’m going to begin.

I opened up the .htaccess file using my FTP client. It’s below.

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress”

Standard WordPress .htaccess. Nothing remarkable here. It’s not the problem. Plan B.

The next step is generally to change the theme to a default WordPress theme to see if that resolves the difficulty. This particular site, however, is already using the default WordPress theme, so that’s not gonna happen. Plan c.

The next step is to see if perhaps there are any suspect plugins. I went to the plugins folder and found two possible culprits: Secure Login and Stop Spammer Registrations.

Just for the halibut, I’ll rename the Secure Login plugin first by putting a 1 at the end of the folder name and try logging in again.

BINGO!

So what happened?

Truthfully, all I can do is hypothesize, but even a somewhat educated guess is likely better than none at all, so here goes. I suspect that when I installed the Security login plugin, it noted my IP address & put it in the whitelist, so that when I logged in from that same address again, it’d recognize me and all would be wonderful. The problem arose because I have a dynamic IP address, that is, my internet provider changes it from time to time. Most consumers, in fact, have this type of arrangement. So when I logged into the site again, my IP address was not the same, and the plugin therefore viewed me as a hacker and locked me out of my site.

All’s well that ends in a well, as a former coworker of mine used to say.

If you’re having similar difficulties, either go to www.wordpress.org/support for free help, or you can email:
support at brighter dash vision dot com
(WARNING: email address munged to prevent spam harvesting, a copy and paste of the above address will produce an invalid email address).

I hope this gave you some ideas of how to troubleshoot a WordPress login problem.