Overview

If your website is having issues (such as displaying a blank page or returning a 500 error), often there is additional information written to an error log. This information can be used to help diagnose exactly where the issue is and allow you to mitigate or correct the error.

Instructions

  1. Log into Plesk or the Conetix Control Panel.
  2. If you’ve logged in via the Control Panel, go to your website service, then select One Click Login:
    reading website error logs in plesk
  3. Within the dashboard area, select Logs:
    reading website error logs in plesk
  4. By default all logs (access and error) will be displayed.
  5. To filter to just the error logs, we need to deselect the other logs. You can do this by using the dropdown menu on the far right and ensuring only the Apache error log is selected:
    reading website error logs in plesk
  6. This will now display only error messages, including PHP error messages.
  7. For example, if the website is WordPress based and you’re seeing errors such as “There has been a critical error on this website”, you may see something similar to the following:
    reading website error logs in plesk
  8. The key part to look for are PHP Fatal Error, indicating a hard error occurred (warnings will still allow WordPress to load). In this instance, we can see that the testplugin was the cause of the crash and should be disabled and/or investigated further.

In most instances your web developer will be the best person to contact in regards to why the error has occurred, however don’t hesitate to contact our support team to have them review the logs for you as well.

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