Ben Tippett

Hi @accessw509, I have dealt with this exact issue many times on Australian hosted WordPress sites. Good move taking a backup first.

On top of what Steven mentioned, here are a few specific things to check:

1. If you can still access wp-admin, go to Plugins and check if any plugin updated recently. A plugin update that conflicts with your PHP version is the most common cause of this error. You can also check this via cPanel File Manager by renaming the wp-content/plugins folder to plugins_old temporarily. If the site comes back, rename it back and then rename individual plugin folders one at a time to find the culprit.

2. Check your PHP version in cPanel. If your host recently upgraded PHP (for example from 7.4 to 8.x), that can break older plugins and themes that have not been updated. You can usually switch PHP versions in cPanel under MultiPHP Manager or PHP Selector.

3. If you have access to cPanel File Manager, navigate to wp-content and look for a debug.log file. If it does not exist, edit your wp-config.php file and add these lines just above the line that says “That is all, stop editing!”:

define(“WP_DEBUG”, true);
define(“WP_DEBUG_LOG”, true);
define(“WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY”, false);

Then reload your site and check wp-content/debug.log for the specific error. That will tell you exactly which file and line is causing the problem.

4. Also worth checking if your site has run out of disk space or if your database connection is working. You can test the database by looking at wp-config.php for the DB credentials and trying to connect via phpMyAdmin.

Let us know what you find in the debug log and we can help narrow it down further.