Nearly every WordPress user has experienced the fabled “white screen of death” at one time or another. If you have been using WordPress for a few years, then you have encountered the white screen of death at least once. The White Screen of Death (WSoD) is one of the most well-known WordPress errors. As the name suggests, it is an error when you try to access your site, but it’s replaced with a plain white screen. There is no error output in most cases, you are left clueless to figure out what is the issue. The reason why this issue is frustrating for users is that it locks you out of your WordPress admin panel. Sometimes it will only affect a certain part of your site. For example, you may only see it on a specific post whereas everything else runs just fine. In other cases, you may only see the white screen of death on your WordPress admin page only. In this tutorial, we can discuss about the common causes and fixes of this issue. Please be informed that, before you make any changes on your website, please make sure you have sufficient backup from your end.
Common causes and fixes for WSoD
The major causes of the white screen of death issue are the exhausted memory_limit, a plugin that is not functioning properly, a poorly coded theme and it could also mean that there is an issue with your web hosting server. We can now discuss about these reasons and the fixes.
Increasing the Memory Limit
If the WSoD only appears occasionally or on certain parts of your site, it may be because your site has exceeded its maximum memory limit. To increase your memory_limit, first, you need to edit the wp-config.php file on your WordPress site. It is located in your WordPress site’s root folder. You can access the file from your cPanel interface or command line or using the ftp client. Open the wp-config.php file first and paste the following code to the file to increase the memory limit.
define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’ );
Once you are done, you need to save your changes and this will increase the PHP memory limit to 256MB.
Investigate Your Theme
The WSoD error may also be caused by a poorly coded theme that you are using. Some themes can be improperly coded, or cause a conflict with one or more of your plugins. Checking to see if your theme is causing the WSoD is simple. All you need to do is try replacing your current theme with a default theme. You can do this by going to cPanel > phpMyAdmin>> open the database table wp_options and the following table names would have to be updated: template, stylesheet, and current_theme. Change the value to twentyeleven. If this method fixes the problem, you know that your theme was the cause of the error. If you have recently made changes to the theme, you should try deleting it and reinstalling the original version.
Test Your Plugins
Plugins are the most common culprit behind the WSoD error, so if you made changes to one lately, your first action should be to deactivate it. Even if you didn’t do anything with the installed plugins on your site, something could have occurred as a result of automating WordPress updates. The easiest fix is to disable all of your plugins. That way, if a plugin is not to blame, you will know as soon as you reload your site. If you can still access your wp-admin page, a quick way to do this is to browse to “Plugins” and select “Deactivate” from the bulk actions menu. This will disable all of your plugins. If you can’t access the admin interface, you can still do this via an SFTP client or your host’s file manager. All you need to do is to connect to your site using your SFTP credentials and then locate the folder called wp_content/plugins. If you rename this folder to anything else, such as plugins.deactivate, you’ll automatically disable all plugins. If the issue was with your plugins, then you should be able to login to your WordPress admin area. Once you do that, go back to your /wp-content/ folder and rename “plugins.deactivate” back to plugins. Now you can activate one plugin at a time until your site breaks again. At which point, you will know exactly which plugin caused the issue.
Other Fixes
If none of the above fixes the issue, then you should try WordPress debug mode, which is a tool built into all installations of WordPress. Normally this is turned off because it’s strictly intended for testing purposes, but you can activate it at any time. Activating the debug mode will create an error log of everything that happens when your site tries to load. To enable debugging you’ll need to open the wp-config.php file of your WordPress install. Within it you should find the following line:
define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, false )
You’ll need to replace ‘false’ with ‘true’ and reload your site. Instead of the white screen, you’ll get a white screen and error messages. It should state which file the error originates in and we can troubleshoot the issue using this error message.
Sometimes WordPress may run into an issue with updates, like the server timing out. In some wild cases, it may lead to a white screen of death. The first thing you should do is go into your WordPress root directory and see if there’s a ‘.maintenance’ file in there. Feel free to delete that file and load up your site again. If the update was not completed it may be done automatically for you, in which case things should go back to normal just the same.
We hope that one of the above tricks fixed the issue for you.
If you need any further help, please do reach our support department.