Htaccess and index

[ChrisPAR]

Is the content of your .htaccess file also the original one that comes with WordPress? Can you share its contents here?

@Admin

Fixing invalid .htaccess rules

If your .htaccess file has an error, this may cause a HTTP ERROR 500 too. Unfortunately, there is no way to get an actual error message in this case.

However, you can remove or rename your .htaccess file (to .htaccess.backup, for example) and refresh the page. If you don’t see the HTTP ERROR 500 anymore, that likely means there was an error in the .htaccess file.

The simplest way to try to fix this is to download a fresh copy of the .htaccess file of your software and use it to replace your current .htaccess file. Doing so hopefully removes any broken lines.

If that’s not an option, you can restore your .htaccess file, and try to figure out which line or lines are causing the issue.

A fairly efficient way to do so is by doing a “binary search”. This means you first comment out about half of the lines in the .htaccess file and see if you still get the error. For example, if you comment out the bottom half and your website works, but you comment out the top half (and uncomment the bottom half) and your website breaks, you know that the bottom half of the code contains the broken line. You can then repeat this by commenting out a quarter of the code, or half of the broken half, to narrow down the error even further. You can repeat these steps until you’ve narrowed it down to a small block or even an individual line of code.

You can then attempt to remove or fix the broken lines specifically. If you’re not sure how, you can ask a question somewhere about the error. You could check the support channel of the plugin or theme causing the issue, ask your question on a general programming forum like StackOverflow, or ask it on our forum in the Hosting Support category .