First, try these steps. They solve most issues.

  • Update Lay Theme & Lay Theme's plugins/addons.
  • Disable all plugins and remove all custom CSS and JS.
  • When using a WordPress Cache plugin, disable it or clear your cache.
  • If your WordPress Dashboard shows a warning "PHP Update required"
    please update your PHP version in your webhost control panel.

Website or /wp-admin/ does not show up: "Critcal Error" or 503 Error

This happens because files are missing or if there is a critical error in PHP code.

If the issues is caused by Lay Theme

First try this: Access your FTP server. When you login to your webhost control panel you can probably use WebFTP right in your control panel. Or you can get your FTP login data in your webhost control panel and use FileZilla to connect.

Now find your website folder and inside go to: "wp-content" → "themes". In here find the "lay" folder. Rename it to something like "_lay".

This will disable Lay Theme. Now see if you can access your website and /wp-admin/ again.

If that didn't change anything, try the next fix: "If the issue is caused by a Plugin"

If it worked, login to /wp-admin/ and go to "Appearance" → "Themes". In here click on "Lay Theme". Then click "Delete" at the bottom right. This will not delete any of your settings or content, as these are stored in the database and in your uploads folder, not in the theme folder.

Now get your lay.zip file. If you don't have it on your computer search for an email by laytheme that contains a link to it. If that doesn't work write an email to lostfiles@laytheme.com with your key or tell us the email address you used to purchase lay theme. If your Lay Theme version is very old and that causes an issue, you can also get the latest version by emailing lostfiles@laytheme.com.

Now in "Appearance" → "Themes" click "Upload" at the top and choose "lay.zip". Upload your zip file and activate Lay Theme.

If the issue is caused by a Plugin

In your FTP go to "wp-content" → "plugins" and rename the plugin folders one by one until your website is accessible again. Just add a "_" underscore in front of the plugin folder's names so you can easily see which name the folder had before.

In /wp-admin/ in "Plugins" delete the plugin that made your website crash. In your ftp server in "wp-content" → "plugins", rename the plugin folders back to their original name.

If the issue is caused by something else

Enable debugging in your wp-config.php file. Read about how to do this here: https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029327771-Enabling-the-WordPress-Debug-log

After enabling debug logging to the debug.log file, open your website in your browser again. Now go to "/wp-content/" on your FTP server and open the "debug.log" file. In here, the error log will give you a hint as to why the website crashes.

Maybe your WordPress installation itself is missing files. You may need to re-install WordPress itself.

An easy way to do this is just to download WordPress from wordpress.org and just upload wordpress using ftp, overwriting your current WordPress installation. This way your uploads folder will remain the same and your database will remain the same.

You can contact info@laytheme.com to get help with this.

Customizer controls do not show up

This seems to be a bug with the latest versions of WordPress. Please go to "Settings" → "General". Set the "Site Language" to a different language, save, then set it back to your original language.

Gridder does not show up

Disable the Yoast SEO plugin and make sure you have updated your Carousel Plugin.

Website does not show or work correctly

Please update Lay Theme and your Lay Theme addons. Lay Theme can only be updated if you have entered a valid license key.

Remove all of your Custom CSS, HTML and JavaScript and disable all extra plugins and see if the problem persists.

When installing Lay Theme WordPress says style.css is missing

Unzip the .zip file you got. Inside there is a file called lay.zip. This is the file you need to upload as the theme.

Texteditor does not show up

Make sure in "User" → [Your User] → "Disable the visual editor when writing" is not checked.
Also make sure you add "define('CONCATENATE_SCRIPTS', false );" to your wp-config.php.

Nothing shows up / 404 Page not found

Make sure you have the latest WordPress version installed.

Disable the plugin "Password Protected".

Your categories, projects or pages may be empty because you did not add any content yet.

Otherwise please log in to your WordPress admin area and go to “Settings” → “Permalinks”. Make sure “Post name” is checked and click “Save”.

If afterwards nothing shows up on your site go back to “Settings” → “Permalinks”. Scroll down. Do you see a sentence like this? “If your .htaccess file were writable…” If so, underneath there will be code that looks something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Your code may differ slightly. Please copy that code (not from here, but from your WordPress admin panel). Then connect to your ftp server with FileZilla.

  • Enter your WordPress folder
  • Make sure you can see hidden files: In the menu of FileZilla go to “Server” and activate “Force showing hidden files”
  • If you don't see a “.htaccess” file, create it: Right click → “Create new file”
  • Right click the new file and choose “View/Edit”. This will open up your default Text Editor.
  • Paste the code into your “.htaccess” file.
  • Save the file and go back to FileZilla
  • It will ask you if you want to upload the modified file back to your server. (Yes)

Now pretty permalinks should be active and navigating in your website should work!

If you still don’t see your content you may find a solution here. Or you can email your webhost support to see if they can solve the problem. Please tell them you tried to activate permalinks for WordPress but it did not work.

Projects don’t show up (but everything else does)

If you open your browser console you see a 403 error. The rest api request for WordPress posts triggers "mod_security" which is a firewall.

If you run into this problem you need to ask your webhost to make URLs like http://yourwebsite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/205 work by adding them to the firewall's whitelist.

URLs like that are Wordpress' REST API URLs that provide the content of your website and this is a common problem with WordPress on some webservers.

Your Layout’s JSON was invalidated

Please make sure you are using a PHP version greater than 5.2. On most webhosts you can set the php version in the webhost control panel. Also make sure you are using the latest Lay Theme version. If the problem persists please write an email to info@laytheme.com.

Also this could happen after you have moved your website. Please make sure to follow this tutorial Moving a Lay Theme website.

Updating a project/page/category redirects to homepage

This has to do with the firewall "mod_security". Quote: ”It is used to block commonly known exploits by use of regular expressions and rule sets. This sometimes blocks the POST requests being generated after a post is updated or published because of the complex HTML content having all the tags, embed code, shortcodes etc. which get caught by the ModSecurity’s rule set.’ (Source) You can disable mod_security or ask your webhost to disable it for you.

.woff fonts or svg files are not uploadable

Try to use Chrome as your browser or try to drag and drop the file into the Media Uploader. For WordPress 4.7.2 you will need to install the plugin "Disable Real Mime Check" in "Plugins" → "Add New".

Nothing shows up in the Media Library when clicking "+Image"

Please disable the "Jetpack" plugin.

I see a 403 error after activating Lay Theme

If you got a 403 error there are a couple of things you can try:

See if you can enable “mod_rewrite” in your webhost admin area. The “mod_rewrite” option is typically hidden in a “php.ini”, “php config” or “httpd” section. If you can’t find it write an email to your webhost support.

If the above does not work try the following:
Connect to you FTP Server either in your webhost control panel via “Web FTP” or with an FTP application like FileZilla.

For FileZilla you will need your FTP servername, username and password. You can find this information in your webhost control panel. If you use FileZilla make sure you can see hidden files: In the menu go to “Server” and activate “Force showing hidden files”.

After you have connected to your FTP Server go to your website folder where WordPress is and find a file called “.htaccess”. Download the file, open it and before “# BEGIN WordPress” add this:

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

Then save the file and upload it to your FTP, replacing the old .htaccess file.

If the above steps don’t work please email your webhost to see if they can solve the problem. Tell them you tried to activate permalinks for WordPress and you are getting errors. Lay Theme needs permalinks to work, that is why it activates permalinks automatically.

Upload folder not writeable or I can’t upload images

Did you upload images before and it worked? Then your webspace might be full now.

Otherwise you probably don’t have write access to your “uploads” folder. Please connect to your server with FileZilla.

  • Enter the folder “wp-content”
  • If you don’t see a folder called “uploads” please create it
  • Select the folder “uploads”, right click it and choose “File permissions…”
  • Find the input field “Numeric value” and type in: 755
  • Click “OK” to apply the changes

This sets the right permissions and now uploading images should work!

In rare cases setting the “File permission” to 755 might still not work. In this case please contact your webhost.

I have a different error and my webhost support could not help me

If your webhost support could not solve the issue, please post your problem in the Lay Theme Forum in the category “Installation Problems”.

Does everything work but you see error messages? Please post in the category “Bug Reports”.

Lay Theme Bugs

If you find any bugs in Lay Theme please let me know in the Forum! For example maybe something doesn’t work at all or maybe you find a detail that doesn’t work so well. If it’s a “visual” thing that doesn’t look right please post a screenshot in the Forum.