Try manually resetting your plugins (no Dashboard access required). If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.
If that does not resolve the issue, access your server via SFTP or FTP, or a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel (consult your hosting provider’s documentation for specifics on these), navigate to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your currently active theme. Hopefully, this will force the default theme to activate and rule out a theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).
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As for the email not arriving, once you’ve fixed the above and updated WordPress, it sounds like your hosting provider has disabled PHP’s mail() function, which WordPress uses to send you email notifications and is also used by contact form plugins and more.
This is a common safeguard employed by hosting providers when they suspect that another customer on the same server is sending spam emails directly from the server.
Another alternative is that PHP’s mail() function is still active, but spammer activity from the server has already caused any email sent from it to be blocklisted. This would result in the emails being sent but never received by any email address with basic anti-spam capabilities.
You can check this by leaving a comment on your site and checking if you receive an email. Another alternative would be to use the Health Check plugin and send yourself a test email from the plugin’s Tools tab to see if it works.
If you didn’t receive a test email, you could try using an SMTP plugin to configure your WordPress site to use your email’s outgoing mail server instead of PHP’s mail() function.
You can enable WordPress debugging to check the exact error.
To enable WordPress debugging, search for following code in the wp-config.php file in the root folder of your website
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);
and replace with the following:
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
define(‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true);
define(‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, true);
Save changes, refresh the web page and see what errors are displayed on the screen.
Please note ’ in above mentioned code is single quote. Single quote is being replaced with this when posting here. You need to replace it with the single quote after pasting the code in the file.
That is for the addition @heateor!
FYI, next time use the Code block to preserve formatting. 😉
Thanks I am just now able to access host, so I will try and figure out how to turn the plugins off.
@heateor i did this, but nothing showed up.
Any luck with the plugins and theme reset?
well i was able to put all plug ins on hold! I don’t know which plug ins are issues, though. Core is out of date, so I am hoping that updating that will fix the plug in issues? Thoughts ? and how do i go about finding the specific plug ins I may need to reinstall?
At this point, I’d start with updating WordPress.
After that, if you renamed the plugins directory to deactivate them, create a new /plugins/ directory, then move them over and activate them one by one until you find the one causing the problem. If you deactivated them in the database, then all you need to do is reactivate them one by one.
Hopefully all you needed to do was update WordPress without the plugins in the way, but it pays to be sure. 🙂
@macmanx Ah, sorry, missed the code block.
