So you go to your website only to see nothing but a white screen such as this.
The most common culprits for WSOD are themes or plugins.
Here are 5 troubleshooting steps you can follow the resolve the issue:
- Disable all plugins. Login to your WordPress admin dashboard. Click on Plugins then Installed Plugins. Check the box at the top to select all plugins and choose Deactivate. Click on Apply. This deactivates all plugins and should resolve the issue if it is plugins related.
You can reactivate the plugins one at a time while checking your site to find the culprit.
If you’re unable to access the admin dashboard, you can connect to FTP using a client such as FileZilla, navigate to the wp-content folder and rename the plugins folder.
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2. Change to the Default WordPress theme. WordPress usually ships with a theme that is named after the year it is released, in this case, twenty twenty. Since my current theme, Awesome Theme is causing the WSOD, I can switch to the default twenty twenty themes to see if that resolves the issue.
If you do not have the twenty twenty theme, you can head over to https://wordpress.org/themes/ and download it from there, unzip it and upload it via FTP to the wp-content folder under themes.
Optionally, you can also add define(‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true) and a log file is created for errors within the wp-content folder.
4. Increase the PHP memory limit. Sometimes, a WSOD can be as a result of PHP running out of memory. To check the current PHP memory limit, you can create a PHP file with the phpinfo() function.
Once this is done, you can access this file in the browser by going to yourdomain.com/phpinfo.php.
Then search for memory_limit. In this case, the memory limit is set to 256M. Which is actually enough for most WordPress installations. If however, this is lower say 100M, you can increase this by editing the wp-config.php file.
But before that, let’s delete the phpinfo.php file since leaving it there can pose a security risk.
To increase the limit, add define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’) to the wp-config.php file. That increases the limit to 256 megabytes.
Changing the memory limit in the wp-config.php may however not work on certain web hosting platforms, and you may have to contact your host for instructions on how to change it.
Sometimes, the memory limit can be changed from your hosting control panel or cPanel.
5. Clear the website cache. Sometimes WSOD is due to stale cache. If you’re using a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache, simply go to Settings, WP Super Cache, scroll till you see the Delete Cache button. Click on it to delete the cache, you can also click on the Delete Cache button at the very top of the WordPress dashboard.
And that’s it, we just looked at 5 simple ways to fix the dreaded white screen of death.
If all fails, contact your web hosting company. It is possible their server is having issues and they may be able to assist you.
Originally published at https://websitementor.net.
