So, you visit your WordPress site and somehow find that it is completely blank. You could have a problem viewing your entire site, or maybe just the front-end or the back-end. What is wrong? Well, this is known as the WordPress white screen of death.

The white screen of death occurs due to some error, it could be:

• Memory exceeded on PHP
• Error with a plugin (in some cases, you may get an actual error output message, and this would be different from the white screen of death)
• Failed installation or upgrade in /wp-admin folder
• Error with caching in the case you run a cache plugin

What To Do First When Troubleshooting The White Screen of Death in WordPress

The primary protocol for problems with WordPress boil down to doing 1 or both of the following:

• Disable plugins one by one via FTP or your web host filemanager
• Change the theme to the default WordPress themes available

Well, if you cannot log into your site, you are going to have to try another route. If you are familiar with using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), log in and go to your wp-content folder. In order to disable plugins one by one, go to the plugins folder and rename each folder. For example, you can rename pluginname to pluginame1. Do this until your site appears. However, you can also disable all plugins at once by just renaming the entire plugins folder to a different name.

In the case that is not the issue, try switching the theme to one of the default themes that WordPress has, like Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve. Of course, you will need to do this by FTP, and go into the wp-content folder, and then into the folder named themes. Within the themes folder, you will see the names of the themes. The one you have activated is the one you will need to rename in order to activate it.

As a side note, especially to any WordPress developer, often you may have inserted plugin snippets that take the place of plugins, and you can either take out the extra code or just change the theme.

Once you have done any of the above, check to see if your site appears. If so, great… if not… you need to troubleshoot some more.

So, That WordPress White Screen of Death is Persistent…

You have disabled plugins and changed your theme. You still have that white screen of death. You might need a little help with WordPress to debug the situation, so you can use the following code. This code goes in the wp-config.php file.


error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1);
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true);


Once this has been placed, you can refresh your site and there should be a message to tell you if something is wrong. If it is telling you something cannot be found, it usually means you are missing a file. If the message says that something is missing, the error message is telling you something in the code is missing. You will need to reload a fresh file.

In some cases, it could be the memory or the cache. You will have to clear the cache on your site, or adjust the php.ini file to increase memory size. You can increase the memory by adding the following line in your wp-config.php file:


define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');


If that does not work, your web host may not allow you to do this and you will have to ask if they can do it for you. It is not a huge request and only takes moments. Worst case scenario is that they say no. If they do not, you might want to seek a more reliable host that allows you some control over your site.

Have you ever suffered from the WordPress White Screen of Death? Was your solution solved with one of these methods, or did you have a different error?