Troubleshooting was definitely something I thought was really scary at the beginning of this. Although as I learned more about it I realized it’s mostly just gathering up as much information as you can to recreate the problem and then working backwards from there. That’s what I did when I purposely broke my site by changing the URLs.
What I Did
At the start of this endeavor, once I changed my URLs in the general settings menu, my site looked like this:
I ended up not Googling anything, as I knew what created the problem in the first place. I knew that the problem stemmed from the URLs being changed, as well as they were changed in the general settings section of the dashboard. From there, I found the new general settings link and and to search a bit to find where I could change the URL again. At this point I’ll admit I ran into a problem because I initially typed in the correct URL wrong. Once I saved the page with the incorrect URL, it lead me to another “This site can’t be reached” page. Simply going back to the page I started at didn’t work because it would revert back to the URL with a typo, so I had to re-login to my dashboard on a separate tab. Only then was I able to type in the correctly spelled URL and fix the problem.
Reflection
Looking back, before I started this it never occurred to me that I could simply work backwards from the problem. Knowing that helped me figure out how best to fix the problem.