How To Fix Internal Server Error 500 for WordPress

August 12th, 2009

If you encounter the same problem that put our blog under “maintenance” here is the solution:

Few days ago I experienced minor problems when I installed the latest version of WordPress to one of my blogs. After everything has been uploaded to the server, I created a sample post & tried to view it as a single post. When I clicked on it I was redirected to Internal Server Error 500 page. Not problem to get to index.php but things started to go wrong when i entered single.php. Here’s the full error description :

500 Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@your-domain.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Now some of you may have arrived at this page when you googled for solutions about this error. Basically errors occured because of the following reasons :

1. The file permissions for your WordPress files is incorrect
2. One of the rules in your WordPress .htaccess file. may be incorrect

If error occured because of the 1st reason, you should login to your web hosting account and look at the error log. There is a particular directory that is writeable by group. Change the permission to 755

If error occured because of the 2nd reason, copy this code to your .htaccess file :

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Hope this solves your problem –Edward Khoo

Thanks Edwardkhoo.com your a life/blog saver