WordPress errors can be extremely frustrating at times, but here’s a little fix that should help those that are getting 403 server errors on WordPress sites.

If you’ve seen the 403 internal server error You don’t have permission to access / on this server and you’re using WordPress it’s quite possible that a simple .htaccess fix will bring your site back to life.

Take a look at your .htaccess file and see if it looks something like this:

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

# END WordPress

If so, you’ll need to change the mod_rewrite parameter from .c to .so like so:

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

# END WordPress

With a little luck and assuming you don’t have additional permission errors, your server error will be fixed and your site will be live once again.

Should this still not help, the next thing to try would be to generate a new secret key for your config.php file. You can do this via:

https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/.

Good luck!