I had a harrowing couple of hours trying to figure out what went wrong with my websites when I installed CloudFlare last week.
Why Cloudflare? It helps to speed up your site. In most cases, enabling it causes no problem, but if you are setup with a naked domain (i.e. no www.) then you might run into the problem I had. Cloud flare also keeps your site up when your server goes down for maintenance or random bugs.
Now that I’ve solved the problem, I’m going to take you through step by step to fix a redirect error that may appear when you activate the service.
If you haven’t installed CloudFlare yet, this tutorial isn’t for you. You can check out my ever-popular, “I’m an overwhelmed blogger” if you need something to read. 🙂
It is only for people who have enabled CloudFlare and then got a “too many redirects” error when trying to access their site.
1. Log into your cPanel.
2. Access your PHPmyAdmin area. This is a great area to get to know. When and if your site goes down and you can’t access your dashboard, this is where all your “stuff” is.
3. Locate your database and look for something called wrd_options.
4. Where it says SITE URL, you want to change it so it reads with the www. In other words, if your site is http://mydomain.com, you want to change it to http://www.mydomain.com. This is the crux of the problem. It has to do with your redirect rules for your site.
5. Once you’ve finished that, go to page 2 of that table. Find the option that says home. Do the same thing that you did in step 4.
6. Log out and clear your cookies from your browser.
7. Within a few minutes, your site should be back up and running!
8. Now the only problem is that some of your interlinks may not work. There is a super simple fix.
9. Go into Settings/permalinks. Change the permalink structure. Hit save. This will tell your database to update all the links and it will recognize the www. is now in front of your domain. Then, change it back to what it was. Hit save again. All fixed!
I hope this helped. Leave me a message if you found this solution worked for the wordpress cloudflare too many redirects error.
And if you want to read the snarky personal version of this tale, I’ve got it on my personal blog. Happy problem solving!
