How To Solve WordPress white screen issue

WordPress white screen of death is one of the most common WordPress mistakes. It is also one of the most frustrating because there is no error message and you are stuck in WordPress. One More problem with the white screen is that it sometimes only affects a certain part of your website.

Example : Here you might only see the white screen in the WordPress admin area, while everything else works fine. In other cases, you may only see it in a specific post, while everything else works fine.

Lets fix WordPress white screen Issue examining different solutions.

Note: before making changes to your site, make sure you have a backup of your WordPress site. If you don’t have access to the admin area, check out our guide on how to manually back up your WordPress database.

Why do you see the white screen in WordPress?

Most of the time when you see a white screen of death, it means that a script on your site has run out of memory.

The WordPress hosting server removes the script that is unresponsive or just expires. This is why no actual error message is generated and you see a simple white screen. WordPress shows white screen instead of website

This error can also occur due to a poorly coded theme or plugin installed on your site. Sometimes it can happen if there is a problem with your web hosting server.

Because the white screen error can be caused by various things, a methodical troubleshooting is required to fix it.

Does the problem appear on the other sites?

If you have other WordPress sites installed on the same hosting account, then you want to start by checking if the problem occurs on other sites as well.

If so, then this is a strong indicator that something is wrong with your WordPress hosting service. This could be a temporary issue affecting your services and you should contact their support for further assistance. On the other hand, if the problem occurs with only one website or with a certain part of that site, then you know that the problem is with that website.

Fixed white screen error with WordPress recovery mode

If the white screen of death error is caused by a WordPress plugin or theme, then WordPress can detect it.

The new Fatal Error Protection feature introduced in WordPress 5.2 can sometimes catch the error, so you may not even see a blank screen. Instead, you will see a message that the site is experiencing technical difficulties.

Technical difficulties

You will also receive an email at your administrator’s email address with the subject “Your site has a technical problem.”

Email with technical issues sent to administrator

This email will indicate the plugin that caused the error and will also contain a special link. This link will allow you to log into WordPress recovery mode and disable the faulty plugin.

WordPress recovery mode

However, if you see plain white screen without email option or recovery mode, you need to fix the error manually.

Increasing the memory limit!

This error usually occurs because a script has run out of memory and is stuck in the middle. To fix this, you need to increase the PHP memory available to WordPress. This will allow the script to use more memory to finish the work it was supposed to do.

Deactivate all plugins!

If increasing the memory limit didn’t help or you have a large memory limit, such as 256M or 512M, you should start troubleshooting.

From our experience in solving this problem, we have always discovered that the problem is related to a specific plugin or topic. Let’s go ahead and disable all the plugins.

If you can still access the WordPress admin area, you can simply go to the Plugins »Installed Plugins page. Select all installed plugins, then select “Disable” from the “Bulk Actions” drop-down menu.

Disable all plugins through the WordPress admin area!

However, if you don’t have access to the WordPress admin area, you will need to disable all plugins via FTP.

Connect to your WordPress site of yours using an FTP client. Once connected, go to the Word Press content folder where you will see the “plugins” folder.

Rename the plugins folder to disable all plugins

You need to right click on the plugins folder and then Choose rename Option. Now You can rename the add-ons folder to disabled add-ons.

Plugins are disabled

FTP client will rename the plug-in folder now.

WordPress will start looking for a folder called plugins to load all plugins for a instance. When you are unable to find the folder, you just have to disable all plugins.

If this fixes the problem, activate a plugin once to get to the bottom of the problem. Once you find the plugin that is causing the problem, you can replace it with an alternative or report the problem to the authors of the plugin.

Replace the theme with a default theme
If plugin troubleshooting doesn’t resolve the issue, you should try replacing the current theme with a default theme.

Connect to your website using FTP client and go to the / WordPress-content / themes / folder. Now it will contain all the themes installed on your website.

Right click to select the current WordPress theme and download it to your computer as a backup.

Download current theme as backup

Then you need to remove the current theme from your website. Right-click on the theme folder and select “Delete.” Your FTP client will now remove the theme from your website.

Delete current topic

Now if you have a default WordPress theme installed on your site, like (Twenty Eighteen or Twenty Nineteen), WordPress will automatically start using it as your default theme.

However, if you don’t have a default theme installed, you must install it manually using FTP.

If this fixes the problem then you should look at your theme’s function.php file. If there are extra spaces at the bottom of the file then you need to remove them and sometimes fix the problem.

If you use a poorly coded function in your theme’s functions.php file, it can also cause the white screen of death error.

We recommend that you download a fresh copy of your theme from its source and then install it.

Enable troubleshooting for errors in WordPress!

If nothing has helped so far, the next step is to start debugging in WordPress. This will allow you to see what kind of errors are being thrown.

Add the following code to your wp-config.php file.

define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true );

Once you add this, the blank screen will now have errors, warnings, and notifications. They can help you determine the root cause.

If you don’t see any errors, we recommend that you check the troubleshooting log. Now Visit the WordPress-content folder on your website using FTP client. There you will find a new debug.log file that contains a log with all errors, notifications, and warnings.

Troubleshooting log

Clear the WordPress cache

Sometimes you can also access the backend data, front of the site has the white screen . This can happen due to a cache plugin issue. Just clear all your cache history.

Check out our guide on how to clear the cache in WordPress for detailed instructions.

Fix longer items!
If you have a white screen of death only on a very long post or page, then this little trick might just work.

This trick practically increases the ability to process PHP text by increasing the recursion and backspace limit. You can paste the following code in the wp-config.php file.

We understand that this is a very frustrating bug and hope that one of the tricks above has resolved the issue for you. We also recommend that you check out our WordPress troubleshooting guide which teaches you the steps you need to take to detect and fix WordPress problems on your own.

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