By Irfan Shafi
I am a developer
I recently migrated my WordPress site from Hostinger to a DigitalOcean droplet (Ubuntu + Nginx). Most of the site works fine, but I’m facing a weird issue with one of the store pages, it doesn’t load correctly or throws a 500 error intermittently.
For example, sometimes it loads partially, or styles don’t render fully.
I’ve checked error logs and increased PHP limits, but the problem persists. Anyone else faced this with DO droplets or during similar migrations? Is it Nginx config or file permission related?
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Heya,
Check your error logs, both for your application/php error log or the nginx error logs. In there you’ll be able to see a more detailed explanation and reason behind this failure. If you provide it to me, I can try and help you with a more pinpoint answer.
Hi there,
It definitely sounds like it could be a file permission or Nginx config issue, especially if the page is loading partially or styles are missing.
Double-check your Nginx server block to make sure static files (like CSS/JS) are correctly served and not being blocked.
Also confirm ownership and permissions, your web files should usually be owned by www-data if you’re using Nginx with PHP-FPM.
Another common cause is missing .htaccess rewrites if you were using Apache before. Nginx doesn’t use .htaccess, so you might need to manually translate those rules.
If nothing stands out in your logs, try enabling WP debug mode to get more detailed PHP errors. Sometimes a broken plugin or missing file throws silent 500s.
- Bobby
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