Wordpress 403 Forbidden "You don't have permission to access / on this server."

1
votes

I can't access any pages/login to my WordPress based website. I get this message: Forbidden You don't have permission to access / on this server.
after some research on StackOverflow and other WordPress support forums I tried to change the .htacess file without success, also tried to duplicate it from the root directory to /wp-admin again nothing has changed... But I'm not really sure about what I did...

I went back to how it was when it stopped working permissions are 705 for the folder and 604 for the .htaccess file which is :

SetEnv PHP_VER 5_3
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I'm using WP 3.4 and I don't know if I use PHP 5.3 (what says the .htaccess 1st line) or 4.0.1 (on PHPMyAdmin from the website host access 'OVH')

Thank you very much for your attention.
Ismaël

3
phpwordpress.htaccesshttp-status-code-403
Try to add Options +FollowSymLinks at the beginning of the htaccess – RafH
Thx, Tried this already before and instead of the 1st line : not working in both cases. – user2402116

3 Answers

1
votes

Make WP recreate the .htaccess the file itself.

Delete .htaccess via FTP, then change your permalink structure to default, then back to your desired permalink style. This will recreate the .htaccess. if that fails, you can try to reinstall the WP core by deleting everything except wp-content and wp-config.php.

0
votes

Found this when looking for a similar issue I had. Cause & fix was different but may be useful to others... I have some content external to the WordPress implementation, in a directory called "Documents" (outside the WordPress hierarchy). I then wanted a Wordpress page to list those documents so I called the page "Documents". Accessing that page gave an error. The fix was to rename the directory as "docs" (moving it to wp-content may have worked too).

0
votes

If you are using WP All-in-One Security plugin, be sure to check the .htaccess file in the root of your Wordpress installation, and look for a section on whitelisted IP addresses. If your current IP is not in the list, then you will get the 403 error.