If you’ve recently migrated your website from one server to another, or changed the domain, added SSL or some similar change, you might run into a common problem. Your home page is working fine (yay!) but your login page is giving you a 404 error.
This is because you’ve missed an important step during the migration process. You need to make a small change in your database. I’ll show you how to do it.
- Log into your server and open phpMyAdmin.
- Click on your WordPress installation’s database in the column on the left. It should drop down and show a number of tables in your database. Click on your wp_options table.
- You’re going to change values in two rows in this table. Find the siteurl row (it should be at the very top) and click the little pencil icon next to it.
- Open a new tab and go to your homepage. Copy the URL of your home page in its entirety (https and www and everything).
- Paste that URL in the option_value field, then click Go.
- Now, do the same thing for the home row (it’s usually right before the siteurl row).
After you’ve completed these steps, go to your website’s login page. Is it working? If so, awesome! If not, the next most likely solution is that you’re having a problem with one of your plugins. Try turning off all your plugins from the backend.
If that doesn’t work, the solutions are many, and we can’t cover them all in this article. But at least this will narrow down the potential causes of the problem. Good luck!