TECH WATCH: How to Fix Too Many Redirects Issue on WordPress

Among many common WordPress issues, “Too many redirects” tops the charts more often than we’d care to admit.

And not a lot of sites on the web have clear solutions to the problems, most are either promoting their own “fixing” services or offer solutions in a way which are totally out of the internet-vocabulary of a common WordPress user.

Addressing both these problems I’m scribbling this guide here which will let you fix the “too many redirects WordPress issue” even if this is your first day with WordPress! Yeah, that’s how simple I aim to make this.

Before carving out the solution, let’s have a glance at what causes it to begin with.

What is the “Too many redirects issue”?

It’s an issue with your WordPress installation which causes browsers to return “redirect” issues, with messages such as “this page has too many redirects” (as on Google Chrome).

Or maybe “This page isn’t redirected properly” as with Mozilla Firefox. There are different versions to the error shown on the screen, but the crux always is that “there is an issue with your redirection”. Simple as that.

Why does the issue Occur?

What causes the issue? There isn’t one fixed root cause, although most often it’s caused by a plugin overwriting your default URL syntax either intentionally, or unintentionally.

There are times when a plugin may overwrite your existing URL structure, or redirection rules, in that case, what may happen is URL A redirects to URL B, and URL B again redirects back to URL A.

So it becomes a kind of an infinity loop and hence browsers return the redirection error.

In other cases, you may have set two different kinds of URLs for your site which confuses the browsers and then too the error may surface.

Although note that it’s only one of the possible scenarios, the redirection issue also has other possible scenarios and causes; but the solution for all of them should be hopefully covered in this guide.

Fixing the Redirection Issue using WordPress Dashboard

One of the simplest fixes to the problem is fixing your URL parameters from your WordPress dashboard.

The case here is that you may have set your site’s URL on your server as www.yoursite.com, while in your WordPress settings, it may be yoursite.com, without the www prefix.

Or, you may have set it without the prefix on your server, but on WordPress you set it with the prefix.

Doesn’t matter where you’ve set what, forget all that you read just now, and simply login to your Admin panel, head over to Settings > General and check your “WordPress URL” and “Site URL”.

Change the “WordPress URL” to a www prefix if it’s set to a non-prefix version, or vice-versa depending on what it’s set at.

Check your error page, is it solved? If yes, Kudos! If not, change the WordPress URL back to what it was before, and this time change the “Site URL” to the prefix or non-prefix version.

Either way, the point is change each one of them once and check the error page, it generally solves the issue.

If You Can’t Access WordPress Dashboard

Maybe the error has hit your WordPress admin panel and you can’t login? Well in that case too you can change the URLs without much hassle.

You need to login to your CPanel, or use a FTP client to access your WordPress files. You need to get to your WpConfig.php file, which is located in the same directory where you installed WordPress (generally simply connect to your FTP client and it’s right there without any directory navigations).

Edit the file, and save the following lines there:

define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://yoursite.com’);

define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://yoursite.com’);

*change “yoursite.com” with your site’s URL.

After saving the file, reload your site and check if the issue gets sorted. If it didn’t, change both the URLs in the code above to “www” version and re-check.

And if it’s still not gone, well in that case it may be a plugin messing around. So let’s see how easy it is to fix that as well.

Fixing via Plugins

There are plugins such as “WordPress SEO” and others which over-write your URLs at times, or you may have done so using the plugins.

Either way, the first thing that needs to be done is, disable all your WordPress plugins. If you have access to your WordPress admin panel, great! You can do so directly from there in a fizzy.

If you don’t have access to your Admin Panel, again use your CPanel, or an FPT client, login to your site’s installation directory and go to the WpContent folder.

There, you’ll get a folder termed “Plugins”, rename this to something else. Anything will work.

Once you’ve renamed this, your plugins get deactivated and now you can access your WordPress admin panel (if the issue was caused by a plugin, if you still can’t access your admin panel, well, in that case, the issue isn’t with a plugin so there’s no point in disabling them).

Anyway, once the plugins are disabled, and if that fixes your problems you know that one of the plugins must be causing the problem.

Start activating the plugins one at a time and refresh your site after each activation, till you reach a plugin which again causes the error.

Now that plugin is the one which needs to be removed for the error to be solved.

Contact your Hosting Provider

Last but not the least options is, drop a mail to your hosting provider. Considering they take their customers seriously, they’ll probably help you out.

Because at times the issue also may have been caused because of a change made by the server admins on their side, so just let them know what you’re facing and if they can help.

Final Words

So that’s a wrap folks. That’s how you solve “too many redirection” errors for WordPress.

If you’re also getting other errors, such as the 403 Forbidden error, you should checkout this post by 000webhost! They’ve aced it.

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