How to troubleshoot Wordpress “White Screen” of Death.

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June 20th, 2009

Wordpress Logo 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:

  1. Opened a FTP Client like Filezilla.
  2. Connected to my Website FTP
  3. Go to: <root>WP-Content\Themes\
  4. 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.

  1. Opened a FTP client
  2. Connect to Website FTP.
  3. Go to: <root>WP-Content
  4. Rename “Plugins” Folder to “Plugins_Old”.
  5. Create new empty folder called “plugins”
  6. This will disable all the Wordpress plugins.
  7. Log into Wordpress and verify that you no longer have the White Screen
  8. Make sure all plugins are disabled.
  9. Delete “plugins” folder you just created.
  10. Rename “plugins_old” to “plugins”.
  11. Log back into Wordpress
  12. Enable plug-ins one at a time to see which one was causing the issues.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “How to troubleshoot Wordpress “White Screen” of Death.”

  1. Jimmy Grippo says:
    February 4, 2010 at 7:30 pm

    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~

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