How to troubleshoot WordPress “White Screen” of Death.
Posted on:
June 20th, 2009
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.
6 Responses to “How to troubleshoot WordPress “White Screen” of Death.”
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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!