You may have seen the blank white screen of death in WordPress if you were fixing something, upgrading manually or automatically, installing or removing themes or plugins, or using the editor to add or remove code.
Wordpress white screen of death fix
It happens, you’re working along – and all of the sudden your main web site is a plain white screen, and even your wp-admin login has gone to white screen – and you have no fix! No way to login to your site, and all visitors see is a broken web site.
What do can you DO?
If you’ve run into WordPress problems before, you’re first instict might be to delete your themes and plugins from the site (after downloading a copy of course), to see if one of them has a conflict. That’s a really good idea, but not good enough to fix the white screen problem in many cases.
An easy check for this would be to go into FTP, and then into the /wp-content folder, and just rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to /wp-content/old_plugins. See if your white screen of death goes away. If not try removing all the themes but default and see if that fixes it.
There is another thing you can check as well that is often the culprit, it’s a blank line at the bottom of your wp-config.php file in the root of your site. Open this file up in a text editor and see if you have a blank line, or if the last line is code. If it’s code your fine, if it’s blank – delete it, save, and re-upload to your site and see if that fixes it.
If none of this works – then the problem is most likely a wordpress upgrade issue inside the database with one of these problems:
1. What plugins are installed
2. What theme is installed
3. What version of WordPress is installed
4. Your .htaccess file is screwed up
I’ve had nearly all 4 things be the cause of my problems at one time or another. So to quickly fix the problem – I usually do the following…
How to fix the WordPress white screen of death
- download a copy of all plugins and themes
- delete all plugins and themes (except for default) from the web site
- delete the root .htaccess file
- manually upload the latest copy of WordPress in FTP right over the files there
- make sure there isn’t an .htaccess file inside the /wp-admin folder
- visit http://www.site.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php to upgrade the db to latest version
- login to the dashboard via wp-admin
- click on “settings->permalinks” and then “save” to generate new .htaccess file
- check that front end of sites now works
- re-upload theme and activate
- upload plugins one by one, checking for conflicts as I go
- site is fixed!
Hopefully this helps you fix your WordPress white screen of death problems!
