How to troubleshoot WordPress “White Screen” of Death.
This post will help you figure out how to resolve the WordPress “White Screen” of death and countless hours of frustration. The two main reasons I have found that is happens is when the default theme has a “-“ in it. I have also found that the “Wordpress White Screen of death” can also happen when there is a bad plug-in installed. This post covers how to resolve the “Wordpress White Screen” issues.
Very much like the “Blue Screen of Death” that everyone dreads, WordPress can display the “White Screen of Death” or “White Page of Death”. Both “screens” are similar in that they typically are NOT a WordPress nor a Windows issue. They tend to be caused by drivers (for Windows) and Plugins/Themes for WordPress.
My First WordPress “White Screen” of Death
This was caused by me making a copy of a them. Let’s just say the theme’s name was “Nova”. I copied all the contents of the them into another directory called “Nova-Wide”. For some reason WordPress 2.8 does NOT like “-“ in the folder name of the them folder. As soon as I renamed the folder to “Nova_Wide” the “Wordpress White Screen” of Death, Bingo. WordPress started working again.
Step I took to resolve the WordPress White Screen:
- Opened a FTP Client like Filezilla.
- Connected to my Website FTP
- Go to: <root>WP-Content\Themes\
- Renamed Theme Directory so there was no “-“ in it.
My Second WordPress “White Page” of Death
This was cause by my favorite “Contact Us” WordPress plug-in. This plug-in for what ever reason has never given me any problems before. I upgraded as there were some security holes that were fixed. After I upgraded the plug-in the “Wordpress White Page” happened again. This time it was caused by the plug-in. I found a trick on how to get around a plug-in that crashes WordPress. You have to rename the “plugins” directory to something else like “Plugins_old”. Create a new plugin Directory. The next time you go the WordPress login screen it will no longer be White. It will say all the plugins have been disabled. Log out of WordPress. Then delete the new folder you created. Rename the old Folder back to “plugins”. Once you have done that log back in and enable the plug-ins one at a time to see which one is the one causing all the grief.
Steps I took to resolve the WordPress White Page of Death.
- Opened a FTP client
- Connect to Website FTP.
- Go to: <root>WP-Content
- Rename “Plugins” Folder to “Plugins_Old”.
- Create new empty folder called “plugins”
- This will disable all the WordPress plugins.
- Log into WordPress and verify that you no longer have the White Screen
- Make sure all plugins are disabled.
- Delete “plugins” folder you just created.
- Rename “plugins_old” to “plugins”.
- Log back into WordPress
- Enable plug-ins one at a time to see which one was causing the issues.
Thank you very much for this posting. It really helped me. I was running WordPress 2.9.1 and I was getting the “White Screen of Death” every time I tried to pull up the Edit Posts page. I did the folder thing you described above and then slowly added back in all my plugins one at a time. I found that the culprit was that I had the Edit Post page set to display the maximum amount of posts (999). I set it back down to display 50 posts and it worked like a charm.
Thanks again.
~Jimmy Grippo~
Jared, thank you so much for this very clear and easy to follow advice. I got the “white screen of death” after installing a new plugin. I had no idea what to do. At least I had backed up my database.
Your instructions saved me! Thank you so much. I am going to make a pdf out of it and keep it handy for emergencies.
Thanks again!
This is not the first time your valuable advice has saved my day. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks dude, I was playing with themes and spent last hour trying to figure out how my theme screwed things up. Wasn’t the -x problem (although that might have contributed) — it was one of my plugins (and I only had two!). Rename, voila, hey look a website that isn’t all white!
Cheers,
PW
I performed a WP 3.0 upgrade on a domain I’m managing for a friend and got the white screen of death. It was simply the default “twentyten” theme that caused it for me. I installed the lightword theme and activated it and once I did that, it showed the page as it should. You could also make sure the .htaccess file is configured correctly.
Just upgraded to WP3.0 after a really long time. The default theme was broken which is why I got the White screen of death. Just clicking on the themes in appearances in the admin area told me that the default theme was broken, and that WP had now reset the theme. Viola! Things started to work! The comment from marlin above helped!
Sounds great. Probably works for a lot of plug-ins, but this did not work for the plug in W3 Total Cache. I guess the plug-in must have affected other parts of my blog.
I was sooooo hopeful but this didn’t work
Any other ideas? I have the post-plugin-install variety of sudden death. Have removed offending plugin from the server and still… nothing.
i have the same problem, and have gone through all the fixes, and nothing works. i can’t get into the site at all, not even the back end.
restored the database, deleted the plugin, deleted the theme….
i’ve been working on this for the last 12 hours and have gotten exactly nowhere. i’m out of ideas about what to try next, and any suggestions at all would be gratefully appreciated!
That’s really great!
w3 total cache freezes the wp 3.0.1 server, against running up to 3mb cache… o.O
Cheers!
I’ve been working with 2 installs of WordPress 3.0.1, and had some issues with trying to access my admin panel. I upgraded from 2.8 on a windows box at yahoo for one of my clients. I read many sites talking about plugins and whatnot. I then found a site that mentioned blank lines at the end of my config file, deleted the blank lines at the bottom, and I’m in again..
Just wanted to say thank you for this! What a great tip to change the name of the Plugins folder to plugins_old. You’ve saved me loads to time!
No problem
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[...] I isolated the cause of my WSOD using the advice from this post: http://jaredheinrichs.com/how-to-troubleshoot-wordpress-white-screen-of-death.html [...]
Thank you so much, for what has to be the MOST straightforward walkthrough of the process to remove “White Screen of Death”.
Just launched my own web comic and suddenly the proverbial “White Screen of Death” wheels fell off, as I started to populate my WordPress blog with wizzy new plugins.
Thankfully, you saved the day.
ROLFE
I just spent 7 agonizing hours dealing with the blank screen. I couldn’t even log in because the admin screen was blank.
It happened when I tried to upgrade my wordpress version 3.1.
After hours of red-faced cursing and threats to headbutt my monitor, I stumbled upon this site and your answer was perfect.
THANKS!!!
These are some good tips. Thanks for posting.
I had to dig a little deeper on my site. Here’s some more things to try:
1)
put this code at the very top of your themes header.php file to see if you can catch any PHP errors:
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', TRUE);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', TRUE);
2)
Check out the permissions and ownership settings of all of your files. The issue I ran into was that my wp-config.php file was not owned by the server group. The solution was to run
chown user:group wp-config.phpfrom the command line, where user is my FTP/linux username and group is the server group name… try “apache” or “psaserv” for the group name.Changing the permissions for wp-config from 640 to 644 also solved the problem, but this is a BAD solution for security. Don’t allow the world to read your config file: your database password is in there and you’ll likely get hacked. Use the chown solution above instead.
gracias por la informacion!! realmente ha sido muy util y me has salvado!
Thank you, Thank you, Thank You! I had tried dis-abling all my plugins, and still got the Blank Screen… I was pulling my hair out. But by following your article and actually renaming the plugin folder I was able to get my theme to show up and solve the issue.
Brilliant.
Thanks so much for this! I was looking for a solution for hours!
Thank you thank you a hundred times thank you! It was rge dash on a WP 2.8 install that killed it, and now it;s working again! Have shared a link to your post on Twitter, it’s hugely helpful, I’d never have figured that out!
Thanks! Worked like a charm!
thank you so much for these instructions…I got the white screen of death on one of my blogs today and I was totally clueless about how to fix it. Your instructions about renaming the plugin folder worked like a charm.=)
I renamed the plugins folder as you instructed and you saved me big time. Than you sir,
You save my life brother. Worked perfect. Thanks a ton!
Thank you thank you thank you
OMG I feel like you just saved my life i almost **** myself when i saw that blank screen and no amount of re-freshing was bringing it back lol…
Thank u so much
I must say you are my saving grace. Thanks a ton…