Changing the site URL broke my Wordpress site

Question

My wordpress kept using the domain as my domain IP address and not my http://www.DestinyKingPhotography.com address. That being said I changed it in the general settings and ended up breaking my site. I tried going to the functions.php option and added

update_option('siteurl','http://www.DestinyKingPhotography.com'); update_option('home','http://www.DestinyKingPhotography.com');

Yet this doesn't work. I know this is a user error but I am struggle to figure this out. I have already been to this link http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL but I still am unable to figure it out.

Please help me out I am so lost.

Thank you

Destiny King

Answer 1

First, use FTP to replace the functions.php file with a good copy and without the IP change function. See Filezilla and FTP Clients « WordPress Codex.

Second, add these two lines to your wp-config.php a few lines of white space below the opening <?php to change back to the IP:

define('WP_HOME','http://your-ip-address');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://your-ip-address');

After your site is back up with the IP, use interconnectit.com WordPress Serialized PHP Search Replace Tool to do a correct find/replace in the whole database, after you do a database backup from Bluehost's Cpanel. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database

If the site doesn't come back up with the lines above in wp-config.php, go ahead and use the Interconnect script to change them in the whole database, but backup your database first.

Answer 2

That's what is referred to as the "white screen of death." There are lots of troubleshooting guides out there. Here's the one from the Wordpress Codex

Since you were editing functions.php, that is probably the root cause. If you can restore the old file from a backup, do it.

In my case, it's almost always been caused by extra whitespace after a ?>. If you don't have a backup, you might want to remove the closing ?> tag from it. It isn't needed.

Good luck.

Answer 3

This worked for me thank you so much.

I had made the same lethal error and used the update_option in "functions.php".

The site completely broke.

I went into my "wp-config.php" and changed the address back to my subdirectory:

define('WP_HOME','http://your-ip-address/wordpress');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://your-ip-address/wordpress');