I have a WordPress website that I recently discovered had this error on the login page:
ERROR: Cookies are blocked due to unexpected output. For help, please
see this documentation or try the support forums.
I can only access the login page from wp-login.php
, since /wp-admin/
displays a blank white page.
I’ve searched the web and tried many things with no success:
-
Removing
?>
and space at end of thefunctions.php
-
Ensuring both
functions.php
andwp-config.php
had no spaces at beginning or end of file -
Opening
wp-config.php
andfunctions.php
in Notepad++ and converting to UTF-8 (people recommend ‘without BOM’ but that is only an option in the newest version of Notepad++ – I’m guessing UTF-8 does that now) -
I’ve set
WP_DEBUG
to true and have received no errors indebug.log
, except for 2 that relate to when I hadn’t fully uploaded some files. That particular error mentionednav-menu.php
; this confirmed that it is reporting errors, just not related to my login issues -
I renamed each plugin folder with
_tmp
at the end to try and rule out any plugins causing the problem -
I also renamed the plugins folder to rule out all plugins at the same time
Given these things I’ve tried, and that I’m not receiving any PHP errors, what else could I try?
This error is generated in wp-login.php , it happens if server is unable to set cookies, this can happen due to several reasons, one of the common issue is: output being sent before setting up of cookies.
Try out following options:
- Update WordPress core, if it is not up to date
- change theme, if you are using custom theme, just ftp into server and delete the custom theme folder, WordPress will revert to default theme.
- If issue still persists, rename plugin folder
Also check error log, errors may not be printed to screen.