Are you gone mad suddenly looking at blank white screen instead of your WordPress site or admin panel? Sometimes WordPress shows a blank white screen of death without any clue of what went wrong. Most of times you will also not able to access WordPress dashboard making you nervous. If you are at this situation and come to this article then don’t get panic and read on to fix the WordPress white screen of death issue and bring back your site in few minutes.
Check Server is Down?
Server down could be the reason for the white screen. If you have another site hosted on the same hosting server check whether it is accessible. Or else check your emails to confirm whether you received any server downtime notification from hosting company.
If server is up then the first important thing is to recall what were you doing just before your site went blank? Most probably you will be doing one of the following things:
Activating / updating / modifying / installing a plugin
Modifying your theme files like “functions.php”
These are the two major reasons for WordPress white screen of death.
Plugins
If you were doing something with a particular plugin before the white screen appears then follow the below instructions to deactivate the plugin.
Open a FTP client like FileZilla or use File Manager options in hosting cPanel account. Read more about using FileZilla to modify files in WordPress.
Navigate to site’s root directory and locate “wp-content” folder.
Open “plugins” folder and locate the folder of the plugin you were updating / modifying.
Change the folder name to something you can identify later (for example if “wordpress-seo” plugin caused an issued rename it to “wordpress-seo_inactive”).
Renaming File Name in Bluehost File Manager
Open a new browser window and try to login to WordPress admin dashboard. If you are able to login then the problem was caused by that particular plugin which will be deactivated with an error “Plugin file does not exist”.
Plugin Deactivated
Now change the name of the plugin through FTP or File Manager to its original name.
Activate and update the plugin again from the dashboard or remove it completely if it is causing the same issue again.
If you are not sure what was the plugin you were working on before the white screen of death appeared then follow the below instructions:
Login to a FTP client or File Manager and navigate to “wp-content” folder.
Now locate the “plugins” folder and rename it something like “plugins_inactive”. This will deactivate all the plugins in your site.
Return back to browser and login to your WordPress admin panel, if it works then navigate to “Plugins” menu.
Activate the plugins one by one and check which one is causing issue and troubleshoot that plugin.
Theme Files
If you were modifying the theme files like “functions.php” before the white screen appears then follow the same instructions like above to modify the theme files.
Login to a FTP client or File Manager and navigate to your site’s root directory.
Locate “themes” folder located inside “wp-content” folder and find out your current active theme.
Locate the php file you were modifying and change the code back to original.
If you don’t know what code you had changed then replace the php file with original file from your backup or from the original theme.
If you don’t want to replace the file (which will revert all your changes back to original theme) then change the theme folder name to something like (mytheme_inactive). This will deactivate the current theme and switch to default WordPress theme.
Ensure default theme is available on your site. In case if you had deleted the default theme files, download it from WordPress themes repository and upload it in your site’s themes folder.
Now you should be able to login back to WordPress admin panel and troubleshoot the required theme files again.
Ensure “functions.php” file does not have any empty spaces at the end of the file after the closing PHP tag “?>” which may also cause the blank white screen to be displayed.
Memory Limit
If you did not do anything with plugins or themes before the white screen appears then try increasing the PHP memory limit of your WordPress by adding the following line to “wp-config.php” file located in root directory of your site. Read our article on editing “wp-config.php” file in WordPress.
Your hosting company may have restrictions on PHP memory limit hence check with them before you change to 128M or anything more than that. They will be able to help modifying the memory limit in “php.ini” file for your WordPress installation.
Caching
After correcting the plugin or theme you may still see your site shows white screen due to caching. Ensure to cleanup the cache when checking again.
Delete your browser’s cache.
Login to admin dashboard.
Delete cached files from caching plugin.
Open your site again.
Deleting Cached Pages in WP Super Cache Plugin
You can also deactivate or delete caching plugin and check your site.
Debugging
If nothing works and still white screen is shown then you can enable debug mode to view the reason for the site not loading.
Login to FTP client or File Manager from your cPanel.
Locate “wp-config.php” file in site’s root directory.
Change the “WP_DEBUG” value to true as shown below:
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I fixed it.
I tried the following:
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
Change Plugins name
Check white spaces
Increase memory
Change Theme
Upload new wp-admin
All of them didn’t work..
I downloaded wp-config with ftp and changed the encoding using notepad++ from utf8-BOM to just utf8
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