So you have just migrated your WordPress site to a new hosting provider. Everything went well until it’s time to test the site on its new home. Instead of the homepage of the site, you found that your web browser displayed the 403 forbidden error. Then you are wondering, what’s the problem?

403 is one of the most common error messages when a website cannot be accessed. When you find this error when attempting to access a website, it means that you have no permission to access the web page. This error can be caused by a file permission issue or corrupted .htaccess file. In your case, the tendency is the latter. How to fix it?

First off, login to the hosting panel (such as cPanel and Plesk) and open the file manager. Or, you can also use FTP to access your files on your server. Delete the .htaccess file which is located on the root directory of your website. You can download it first just in case everything doesn’t go well.

Once the .htaccess file is deleted, try to re-access your website. If you can access your file normally, then the problem is clear: your .htaccess file is corrupt.

How to fix the corrupted .htaccess file

.htaccess itself is a configuration file for use on web servers running the Apache Web Server software. In WordPress, this file is automatically generated on the installation process. If this file is corrupt, you can simply delete it and create a new one. To do so, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings -> Permalinks. On the Permalink Settings page, simply click the Save Changes button without making any change. This will generate a new .htaccess file on your server.