How to Fix Error 403?

When you see your web-site showing you the error 403 and word “Forbidden”, it is at least embracing. How come you can’t access your own web-site? If you run a project on WordPress basis, you can easily restore the access to your web-site, because it is easy and requires just several minutes when you use a cPanel or FTP.

Don’t forget to back up

Before doing any actions, perform a full backup of your web-site. Troubleshooting of error 403 requires altering the site, so you should be able to restore it just in case. As soon as backup is made, you can try to restore it with earlier backup to see whether the error will be eliminated this way. If you can’t access the back-end of your site, this is not an option for you.

Then you can start troubleshooting two ways (note that they are better to be done in this order):

1. Review User Permissions. If you use a plugin that manages users’ signups and accounts somehow, there may be a bug or some manual error that has accidentally locked your site. Since some plugins have control over permissions, you can access your database via phpMyAdmin to alter your admin account manually and include the missing permissions. If you don’t know what should be done with this or that plugin, consult the plugin developer or documentation.

Sometimes access to pages may be blocked by security plugins, which is actually not bad, because it lists the files and pages on your web-site. Sometimes hackers use certain file locations to attack a web-site directly, not searching for the targeted file.

2. Another step is to examine your file permissions, because every file in your site has some rules defining who can open and manage it. They are called permissions and they have been created to check if visitor is allowed to access what he has requested. If a user is prohibited to look at a file, an error 403 will appear.

Check for more information about error troubleshooting and resolving in https://inxyhost.com/blog/cdn:-errors-and-their-reasons.