If you search the web you’ll find virtually every website that address the 403 Forbidden status code in WordPress lists off the same steps to take to resolve the issue. Well there was one that they missed (or I missed) and that’s the possibility of an existing folder. Let me explain.
This morning I found in Webmaster Tools that my client’s contact page was having crawl issues. My SEO software also listed the crawl anomaly, and even testing the page at the W3C Validator was unsuccessful. W3C displayed an error – 403 Forbidden.
What did I do to resolve the error?
After trying out various tests like deleting and regenerating the .htaccess file, deactivating all plugins, checking file permissions, and even going through the code within pertinent files in the theme directory, e.g. header, footer, index, and functions, I still couldn’t solve the problem.
Note: the page was displaying just find in by browser, but apparently couldn’t be crawled by any bots and spiders.
Finally, I decided to look into the root directory to see if there was anything there including an error file that I could look at, and found that a /contact/ folder had been made in the root of the server. There did lie my problem.
What stopped the error message?
I deleted the folder (I looked in it first and it was empty) and tested again, and the 403 Forbidden error was no more.
How did the contact folder get there?
Apparently another developer that had access to the server created the file while testing an instant chat plugin.
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Hi,
I was stuck on 403 forbidden error at my website. I was searching for a possible solution and I came across your article. I found this one to the best article and found the solution to my problem. Definitely, a very good article to fix this error. Thanks for sharing such detailed information.
Keep it up.