The “error establishing a database connection” is probably one of the most frustrating and frightening errors that WordPress users can encounter.

This error occurs when WordPress is unable to make a connection to the database thus preventing the entire website from loading. In fact, you won’t even be able to access the WordPress dashboard (your site’s back end).

In this article, we will show you how to easily fix the error establishing a database connection in WordPress.

Common Causes of the Error Establishing a Database Connection

1. Incorrect database login credentials. Possibly the most common cause of the Error Establishing a Database Connection is simply that WordPress has incorrect login credentials for your database.

WordPress needs the following information for connecting to the database:

• Database name
• Database username
• Database password
• Database server

This information is stored in the WordPress configuration file called wp-config.php.

If any of these items are incorrect, WordPress would fail to connect to your database server, and you’ll see the ‘Error establishing a database connection’ error.

2.Your database is corrupted. With so many moving parts with themes, plugins, and users constantly deleting and installing them, sometimes databases get corrupted. This can be due to a missing or individually corrupted table, or perhaps some information was deleted by accident.

3.WordPress core file corruption. Similarly, corruption can occur in the core WordPress files that make up your site. Even though these files are outside the database, they may sometimes result in the same error.

4.Issues with your database server. A number of things could be wrong on the web hosts end, such as the database being overloaded from a traffic spike or unresponsive from too many concurrent connections. This is actually quite common with shared hosts as they are utilizing the same resources for a lot of users on the same servers.

5 Easy Fixes for Error Establishing a Database Connection in WordPress:

• Check whether your database login credentials are correct (most common reason of the issue).
• Repair a corrupt database with WordPress’ built-in database repair mode: define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);
• Fix corrupt files.
• Check with your hosting provider for issues related to your database server.
• Restore to your latest backup.

1.Check Your WordPress Database Credentials

The most common reason for database connection error in WordPress is incorrect database credentials. If you have recently moved your WordPress site to a new host, then this could be the most likely reason.

Your WordPress database credentials are stored in the wp-config.php file. It is the WordPress configuration file that contains important WordPress settings including database information.

You’ll be looking for the following lines in the wp-config.php file.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** // /** The name of the database for WordPress */ define( 'DB_NAME', 'database_name_here' ); /** MySQL database username */ define( 'DB_USER', 'username_here' ); /** MySQL database password */ define( 'DB_PASSWORD', 'password_here' ); /** MySQL hostname */ define( 'DB_HOST', 'localhost' );

You need to make sure that the information for the database name, username, password, and database host is correct.

You can confirm this information from your WordPress hosting account dashboard. Simply log in to your hosting account and click on MySQL databases under the database section.

This will take you to the database management page in your hosting dashboad. From here, you can find out your database name and the username.

Below that you will find the database users and links to change the user password.

Once you have confirmed your database name, username, and password, you can change that information in your wp-config.php file if needed.

After that, try visiting your website again to see if the database connection error has gone.

If you can still see the error, then this means that something else is wrong. Continue reading for more troubleshooting steps.

2. Check Your Database Host Information

On ensuring that your database name, username, and password information is correct, then you may want to make sure that you are using the correct database host information.

Most WordPress hosting companies use localhost as your database host. But, some managed WordPress hosting companies use separate servers to host databases. In that case, your database host information will not be localhost.

You need to contact your WordPress hosting company to confirm your database host information.

3. Repair WordPress Database

If you are getting a different error on the wp-admin, for instance, something like “One or more database tables are unavailable. The database may need to be repaired”, then you need to repair your database.

You can do this by adding the following line in your wp-config.php file. Make sure to add it just before ‘That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging’ line wp-config.php.

1	define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);

Once you have done that, you can see the settings by visiting this page: http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

Note: the user does not need to be logged in to access the database repair page. After finishing repairing and optimizing your database, make sure to remove this code from your wp-config.php.

4. Check if Your Database Server is Down

If all the above steps have failed, one final possibility is that your database server has gone down. At this point, it’s a good idea to verify with your hosting provider that everything is working correctly.

There are a number of reasons why your database host or server might be experiencing issues:

• Too many simultaneous connections to the database. Some providers have limits on how many connections a server can have at one time.
• Problems with another site on your shared hosting server. If you’re on a shared hosting plan, you’re splitting resources with other sites. If one of them has problems, it can spill over to your site. This is one of the reasons dedicated or managed WordPress hosting plans can be beneficial.
• Hardware troubles. Hardware eventually fails, and it’s possible that the server your database is stored on has done just that. Ideally, your host will have redundancies in place so that if one server goes down, there’s another copy of your data available, but this isn’t always the case — especially if you’re hosting your own database on a home or office server.

Your best bet here is to reach out to your web host and inquire about outages or other known issues. If there are none, you can report your problem and ask the support staff to look into it for you.

5. Restore Latest Backup

And last but not least, you can always resort to a backup if needed. In some cases, this might be a faster way to resolve the issue if you aren’t worried about losing any data between when your last backup was taken. Many hosts have their own backup restore process. Remember that you might need to restore both your database and your files.

You can use back up plugins to restore your website.

READ MORE >>> HOW TO MONETIZE A WEBSITE.

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