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[…] WordPress debugging 17 August 2010 Joost de Valk No comments, leave your own! After reading this post about the "WordPress white screen of death" I wanted to quickly share with you a quick hack I do in […]
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[…] it. So, if you are blogging on WordPress and plan to upgrade to 3.0, you might want to read this WordPress White Screen Of Death […]
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[…] you’re seeing a blank white screen, consult WordPress and the White Screen of Death. If you’re seeing “Fatal error: Allowed memory size,” consult WordPress and the […]
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[…] WordPress and the White Screen of Death […]
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[…] the Blue Screen of Death. I had my own brush today with WordPress’s equivalent – the WordPress white screen of death. (This article saved me a lot of time!) I was going to work on a post at lunch, but this took up […]
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About the Author
- James
James began using WordPress in 2004. Being new to WordPress (and blogging in general), he quickly found the WordPress Support Forums and basically never left. James currently resides in sunny Southern California, where he enjoys bringing happiness to millions of WordPress.com users.
Web: http://macmanx.com
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Great post. I’ve been lucky not to have ever dealt with the white screen of death, but I definitely know a few people that were pulling their hair. Very helpful.
If you ask me, unless you’ve felt that gut wrenching feeling when the browser stops loading and the screen turns pure white, you cannot claim to be a WordPress blogger.
I ran into this exact problem recently, and didn’t know what was going on. Turns out, I’d put an extra blank line while editing functions.php, which caused the white screen.
This is a great article. I had this problem yesterday after a WordPress update. What helped me and a lot of other people too was going back and overwriting the functions.php file in your theme with the original. After that, everything was back to normal!
This is a great post; I used both of these methods. An additional method would be to view the source of the page – where did it stop loading? That can be a good indicator as well.
And check your error logs.
A good amount of the time, server logs will show *exactly* what php function is causing the issue, and where.
I do a lot of custom Thesis theme development and have this problem if I mess up my PHP syntax. I’ve found running a PHP validator on the code prior to saving it really helps and catches those stupid but all too common mistakes. It certainly doesn’t catch everything, but definitely catches enough to really help.
I agree though that if you’re not doing custom development, 99% of the time it’s a plugin issue.
I had a theme do it once or twice. If you press Preview and it doesn’t load, needless to say, do not activate the theme.
When it happens and I know it’s not the theme, I FTP in to change wp-content/plugins to wp-content/plugins999. WordPress will then automatically turn off all the plugins. I then re-create a new wp-content/plugins folder and one by one, move each plugin over by importance, activate it, and I see what happens.
One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes it’s not just one specific plugin that causes the problem, but a combination of plugins combining to create a conflict.
Oh the white screen of death. It really can drive a blogger crazy. My usual experience with it, is when I try to install a new theme and then once you activate it, everything goes blank white and you can’t even see your dashboard anymore..great post
One situation that I have encountered a bunch of times is White screen of death without any errors in code.
The solution was to move plugins folder from wp-content, refresh frontend and then adding it back in. I have no idea why this have solved the problem it just does.
It works… at least in this right very moment for me, it worked!
Thanks.
I am in total agreement with this post. The Themes in particular appear to require the “proper” installation of older themes which can cause these pronlems. My first site that went wrong was more about problems with the plugins. My second site required me to fix the themes too! Quite frankly, some of the issues with themes and plugins are barely believable, including an issue with a blank line at the start of my wp-config.php file that foxed me for at least 2 days!
Good luck with any upgrades to 3.0 and above!
Mark
This white screen of death thingy isn’t helping my present fear of upgrading to WordPress 3.0 :-(.
I tried to post a simple non-spamy comment and it said my comment wasn’t accepted?
If you posted the other comment around the same time as this, I checked both the spam queue and the trash and I couldn’t find it. Maybe it was just a momentary glitch?
Thanks!! I built my own theme form scratch and when I loaded it I got the blank white screen. I was scared id have to rework the whole thing but then I saw on here that it might be the functions.php and it was… a syntax error!
Also, check the file permissions. A client whose site had been up for quite some time…well the host went and changed the file permissions. So any time a plug-in was activated…the white screen of death appeared.
Chris
Thankyou so much! Your troubleshooting tips helped enormously. My plugins acted up, so I deactivated them in MySQL. And did some updates. Now all is well. Many thanks!
-Paul.