WordPress Troubleshooting & Repair: We Fix Broken WordPress Sites
Your WordPress site is showing an error, a page broke after an update, or something just stopped working and you can’t figure out why. That’s what we do. Penner Web Design is a father and son WordPress studio in Durham, NC that specializes in WordPress troubleshooting: plugin conflicts, critical errors, white screens, broken layouts, hacked sites, and the weird problems nobody else can diagnose. Send us the symptom, and we’ll find the cause, fix it, and explain what happened in plain English.
“There has been a critical error on this website.” Sound familiar?
WordPress errors rarely tell you what actually went wrong. A white screen of death, a 500 internal server error, or a database connection error all point to different root causes, and guessing can make things worse. We diagnose the real problem by checking error logs, isolating plugin and theme conflicts, and testing fixes safely before touching your live site. Most WordPress errors we see come down to a handful of causes: a bad plugin update, a PHP conflict, a corrupted file, or a hosting issue. We fix them all, and we tell you exactly what happened so it doesn’t catch you off guard again.
A plugin update broke your site?
Plugin conflicts are the number one cause of broken WordPress sites. One update goes out, two plugins stop playing nicely, and suddenly your contact form fails, your images disappear, or the whole site goes down. We isolate the conflicting plugin, roll back or replace it, and get you stable again. We also clean up abandoned plugins that no longer receive updates, since these are the ones most likely to break your site or open a security hole. If your site broke right after you clicked “update,” don’t keep clicking. Send it to us and we’ll untangle it safely, with a backup in place before we change anything.
WooCommerce checkout not working?
When your store breaks, you lose money by the hour. We troubleshoot WooCommerce problems that directly cost you sales: checkout pages that won’t load, payment gateways that reject valid cards, shipping calculations that come out wrong, and stores that have slowed to a crawl. Many WooCommerce failures are caused by an unrelated plugin interfering with the checkout, which is exactly the kind of hidden conflict we know how to find. We work on real stores with real revenue on the line, so we test on staging first and never experiment on your live checkout.
Built your website with AI and got stuck?
AI tools are great at getting a website 80 percent done. It’s the last 20 percent that leaves people stuck: the layout that won’t behave on mobile, the code snippet that broke the whole page, the plugin the chatbot recommended that conflicts with everything else. If you built your site with an AI website builder or with ChatGPT’s help and you’ve hit a wall, we can get you unstuck. We’ll review what the AI built, fix what’s broken, and set up your site on a solid WordPress foundation so it stays fixed. No judgment. You did the hard part by starting. We’ll help you finish, and we can even show you how to keep making updates yourself.