You go to your website and there is nothing. No error, no warning, no menu. A blank screen. It's called White Screen of Death and it is one of the most distressing WordPress errors precisely because it doesn't tell you what happened.
The good news: it is almost always fixable and it is almost always the same cause. Let's go with it.
Why is it blank
WordPress is powered by PHP. When PHP encounters a serious error and doesn't know how to continue, it stops running. Since by default errors are not shown to the visitor (something reasonable for security), what reaches the browser is exactly that: nothing.
The most common causes, in order of frequency:
- A plugin that has been updated incorrectly or is incompatible with your version of PHP or WordPress
- The theme, for the same reason
- PHP memory exhausted: the server cuts the execution halfway
- Code added by hand in functions.php with a syntax error
What to do, step by step
1. Activate debug mode
Before you touch anything, have WordPress tell you what's wrong. Edit the wp-config.php file (via FTP or from your hosting file manager) and look for the WP_DEBUG line. Leave it like this:
With this errors are written to /wp-content/debug.log instead of being displayed to visitors. Reload the website, open that file and the last line is usually the culprit, with first and last name: the path of the plugin or file that failed.
Important: Set WP_DEBUG back to false when you're done. Leaving it active in production is a security risk, because it can leak routes and internal details of your installation.
2. Deactivate plugins without accessing the desktop
If you can't get into /wp-admin, you can still deactivate the plugins. Connect via FTP and rename the /wp-content/plugins folder to plugins-off. WordPress won't find them and will disable them all at once.
If the website comes back, you already know it was a plugin. Rename the folder back to plugins and activate them one by one from the desktop until it breaks again. The last one you activate is the problem.
3. Try the default theme
If disabling plugins hasn't helped, rename your theme folder to /wp-content/themes/. WordPress will automatically load a default theme (Twenty Twenty-Something). If the website appears, the problem is with your theme.
4. Raise the memory limit
Add this line to wp-config.php, before the comment that says “That's all, stop editing”:
If the problem was memory, the website will return. Note: this is a patch. If your WordPress needs more and more memory, there is something in the background that should be checked.
What really matters: why you came here
All of the above is putting out the fire. The interesting question is another: why did it break?
In the vast majority of cases we see, the blank screen appears right after an automatic plugin update. WordPress has updated only by default for years, and that's fine for security, but it means that your website can crash on a Sunday at three in the morning without anyone touching anything.
And there's the real problem: it's not that it breaks, it's how long it takes someone to find out. If your website goes down on a Friday afternoon and you don't see it until Monday, you've lost three days of forms, calls and sales. And you won't even know how many, because those visitors simply left.
How to avoid
There is no way to guarantee that WordPress will never crash. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you smoke. What can be done is to greatly reduce the probability and, above all, shorten the reaction time:
- Verified updates, not blind: check what is updated and check the website afterwards
- Automatic backups, to restore in minutes instead of rebuilding in days
- Uptime monitoring, to find out before a client tells you
- A test environment if the website is critical, to update there first
This is exactly what we do in our WordPress maintenance service: We don't promise that nothing will ever fail, we promise that if it fails we will find out, not you, and that there is a recent copy ready to restore.
If your website went down right now, how long would it take you to find out? That answer is usually the best argument to review how you have set up maintenance.
Would you prefer us to review it? Take a look at our WordPress maintenance service either tell us what your website needs and we will respond to you in less than 24 hours.