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At the top of your WordPress admin page, there should be a bar at the top.
It shows your website name, how many comments you have on your various pages, gives you the option to add a new page, to edit posts—among other things. For various reasons, sometimes this can disappear.
Unless you type wp-admin at the end of your site URL, but into the address bar, you just can’t get back to the dashboard. This is a waste of time.
In this post, we’ve rank-ordered the top fixes. Scroll through each until you find that you restore your WP admin bar and it reappears.
Content Guide
If you’re unsure whether it’s your device that’s the issue or the admin page itself, try loading on a private browser tab—or from a different machine. If this makes no difference, consider resetting your account by using your web host’s live chat support (the fastest and easiest solution).
1. WP Admin Bar Missing When ‘Viewing Site’
You click the ‘view site’ button and suddenly the top bar disappears. The following could be the solution to your issue:
Fix:
- Head to the admin panel on WP.
- On the toolbar panel, select Users.
- Choose the user account that you use.
- Scroll to the setting that says “show toolbar when viewing site”—and enable.
2. Randomly or Always Missing Glitch Fix
The top bar is either randomly or constantly missing. Again, the problem is likely to do with the wp-footer tag not firing. This causes a fatal error. (The problem isn’t the footer but the top bar, right? But stay with us!)
What Is the Footer in WordPress? ❓
The ‘footer’ WordPress is the bottom section of the website that shows up after the main content. You can usually see it on all of your website’s pages.
(Using a premium theme, then this may be different. But you may still have a section with copyright information.)
Because the section of the website is the furthest out, beginners often ignore it. They can be utilised for helping your users quickly find information about your business; an extra menu.
For this purpose, all the best WordPress themes have a footer section that’s configurable. You can manually also edit the footer.php template file in your theme to get rid of unwanted sessions from this area.
We can also use it to find and fix problems.
Manually Editing WordPress’ Footer 🔧
Before we can give you the solution, you need to get familiar with locating and editing the footer file.
You won’t need to be a coder or WordPress expert to do this. The footer.php file is simply a template file that is stored in your WordPress theme folder. It’s responsible for displaying the footer section of that specific theme. When it fires, the footer shows.
Tip: Whenever making changes to your website’s code, it’s best to make a backup first, so you can easily restore your website if anything goes astray.
- Download an FTP client so that you can download your website files (‘how to use FTP, for beginners’).
- Navigate to the following folder to find the footer.php file: /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/footer.php (instead of “yourtheme”, it will be whatever theme you’re currently using).
- Use a text editor such as Notepad to go into the code. We’ll show you what to edit in the section below so that we can re-upload onto WordPress with the correction.
The following could be the solution to your issue:
More Troubleshooting 👨💻
If the above doesn’t work and you are not an experienced developer, there are ways you can try to fix this error.
Switch to your default theme, if that’s not what you’re currently using.
Is the top bar loading now? No? Then run through the same process above and see if you can detect the wp_footer function.
Also caused by a poorly coded plug-in. Deactivate and reactivate all your plug-ins one by one. See one of these solves your issue.
The fun thing to do is to enable debugging mode in WordPress. This lets you view the errors, notices and warnings that were previously hidden with me. This gives you a clue as to what’s causing the problem.
(We recommend that you don’t try to do this manually because it will definitely require coding experience. Plugins like WP Debugging will expose PHP code issues in a matter of a few clicks.)
If this still doesn’t work, or the last bit of advice reveals warnings, you may need to debug WordPress. We don’t recommend attempting this unless you have coding experience. So head to your web host’s live chat support; they’ve likely seen this many times before and will give you a quick solution.
3. What Causes the Admin Bar to Disappear?
Whether or not the WordPress admin bar appears not is usually decided by the wp_footer() hook which is located in the footer. Most of the time when the admin bar is missing, this is the reason.
It’s a legitimate preference setting that you can set or undo in WordPress itself.
Other times, there’s a broken script that causes a fatal error before the hook can fire away.
The fix could be simple or something complicated. For instance, it could be that there are CSS/HTML conflicts, or that your WordPress installation isn’t fully upgraded.
Should I Use WordPress?
We recently made a post on cool WordPress market share stats.
Overall, it’s hard to beat this CMS (Content Management System) in terms of sheer features, ability to rank on Google and other search engines, and the number of integrations that work seamlessly with it.
However, it’s absolutely not the best for beginners to web design.
In the context of WordPress versus Wix (Wix is one of the most popular drag-and-drop web designers), you can save an enormous amount of time—as a beginner starting a website from scratch.
That said, WordPress is 10 times as popular as its closest competitor, Joomla. And it rivals Facebook in terms of its number of monthly unique visitors.
See more interestingly weird and wonderful WordPress usage statistics and market share facts.
We hope this post was useful in solving a solution. Don’t forget that live chat support is your superpower when it comes to troubleshooting your website.
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