The WordPress White Screen of Death Print

What you're seeing

You open your site, or your admin area, and get nothing. A blank white page. No error, no message, no clue, just emptiness where your website should be. This is known, half-affectionately, as the White Screen of Death, and it is one of WordPress's most common and most baffling problems, because a blank page tells you nothing about what went wrong.

As with most WordPress scares, your content is almost certainly safe. Something is stopping a page from finishing loading, and the job is finding what.

What causes it

• A plugin conflict or a bad plugin update, by far the most common cause. A plugin hits an error serious enough to halt the page before anything appears.
• A theme problem, often after a theme update or a change to theme files.
• The site running out of memory, where a page needs more resources than the account currently allows and simply stops.
• A deeper code error, which is where it stops being a DIY fix.

Narrowing it down safely

1. Is it the whole site or just part? Check your homepage and your wp-admin separately. If the admin area still works and only the public site is blank, the problem is very likely your theme. If the admin area is blank too, a plugin is the more likely cause. This one observation does most of the diagnosis.
2. Think about what changed just before. An update, a new plugin, a theme switch, an edit? Whatever happened last is the prime suspect, and undoing just that often brings the site straight back.
3. Clear your browser cache and try once more, since occasionally you are looking at a stale blank page that has already resolved.
4. If you can still reach wp-admin, the safe DIY move is to deactivate your plugins and see if the site returns, our article on deactivating plugins walks through doing it gently, one at a time, so you find the culprit rather than just carpet-bombing them all. If deactivating a plugin restores the site, you have found it.
5. If a recent theme change is the suspect and you can reach wp-admin, switching temporarily to a default WordPress theme tells you in seconds whether the theme is to blame.

Where the safe steps end

If you cannot reach wp-admin at all, the usual next steps, deactivating plugins by renaming folders over the file system, raising the memory limit in the configuration, or turning on WordPress's debug mode to reveal the hidden error, all involve editing files directly. That is where we take over, because a mistake in those files replaces a blank page with a worse one.

Hand it to us when

The admin area is also blank, so you cannot deactivate anything the normal way, or you have tried the plugin and theme steps and the screen is still white. Open a support ticket with your domain and what changed just before it happened. We can switch on debugging safely, read the error the blank page is hiding, and fix the cause at the file level, which is routine for us and nerve-wracking to do yourself.

Good to know

The blank screen is WordPress hiding its error messages, which it does by default so that visitors never see raw code. That is good for your visitors and unhelpful for you, and it is exactly why this looks scarier than it is: the diagnosis is usually simple once the hidden error is visible, which takes us moments. If white screens keep recurring after updates, it often points to a memory limit that is too low or a plugin that does not play well with others, both of which we can sort out properly so it stops happening, rather than you rediscovering this page every month.