Whatever glitches, error messages, or bugs that pop up while you are using WordPress, chances are you can find a solution to your problem if you Google it.

Recently I was working on a client’s blog and one of the issues she informed me about was that “preview page” and “preview post” was returning a blank page or a message stating that the page wasn’t found.

I thought that was odd. So the first thing I did was upgrade plugins that needed to be upgraded because sometimes older plugins can cause problems and error messages to occur.

That didn’t fix the problem. So then I tried deactivating and re-activating all the plugins one by one to see if one of the plugins was causing havoc. It was not the plugins.

So then I thought perhaps a file within the wp-admin folder was corrupt or missing so I re-uploaded and over-wrote the wp-admin folder via FTP. That did not solve the problem either.

Finally I Googled the problem I was having and I found the answer in the WordPress support forum. What caused the glitch was that in “Settings-General” under WordPress address (URL) the “www” was missing from the URL.

For example, for this blog my blog address is http://karenblundell.com and my WordPress address is also http://karenblundell.com so everything works fine. However, if my blog address was http://www.karenblundell.com then I would have to enter http://www.karenblundell.com under the WordPress url so that everything works as it’s supposed to.

Once I fixed this tiny discrepancy on my client’s blog, her “preview page” and “preview post” worked fine. Hurray!

Sometimes the simplest things can take the longest to figure out. Often you are not the only person who has a particular problem and the support forums at WordPress.org usually have the answers you seek. If not, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

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