WordPress Blank White Pages

If your WordPress site is not responding or stalling or just showing a blank white page (sometimes called the “WordPress White Screen of Death”), this most likely results from a corrupted/hacked plugin or theme.  When loading the site in your browser, it’ll continuously load until it times out, or load a blank white page (no error).  Here’s how to troubleshoot it.

Display Errors

There’s a lot of things it could be, but with no error messages to guide us, it’s a crap shoot.  So, let’s enable errors and see what’s pitching a fit.

1. Open your WP-Config.php file in an HTML editor (it’ll be in the site’s root)
2. Look for a line that says define('WP_DEBUG', false);
3. Change ‘false’ to ‘true’ so it reads define('WP_DEBUG', true);
4. Save and upload the wp-config.php file

Now, if you re-load the page, you’ll see errors. Doesn’t matter if they don’t make a lot of sense.

If most are coming from /wp-content/plugins/, see the section below about Plugin Issues.  If most of the errors are from /wp-content/themes/, it’s probably a theme issue.  See the section below about Theme Issues.

WP-Config.php Issue

Incorrect information in your wp-config.php file can cause a white blank page to appear.  Open this file in your favorite HTML editor and check the database information is correct.  If the database server itself was down, you’d get an “Error Establishing Database Connection” error–not a blank screen.

Check the Bootstrap

If your config file looks fine, make sure your site has the WordPress index.php file uploaded to the root of the server.  Also, make sure there isn’t another index file in the root of the site.  If there’s an index.html or default.html or default.php, your web server may favor that over the WordPress index.php file.

Fixing it is easy.  If it’s not there, upload one.  All WordPress index.php files are the same, so you could use your local copy or download WordPress again, and just upload the index.php file from the root.  If there’s another index or default file in the root that’s blocking the WordPress index.php file from loading, just delete the other file.

Plugin Issue

Could be a hacked plugin, a bad plugin update or some other sort of plugin weirdness.  The easiest way to deactivate ALL your plugins at once is to open an FTP client (like FileZilla) and rename the /wp-content/plugins/ directory to something else, like: /plugins-backup/.

That forces WordPress to load with NO plugins active at all.  Don’t worry.  All the plugins are still there and their settings are safe in the database.  They just won’t be seen by WordPress which will assume they’re aren’t any plugins active.

View the site in a browser and see if that fixes the problem.

Theme Issue

Perhaps more likely than a plugin issue, your theme couldn’t have become corrupted (hacked, or just jacked).

Open an FTP client (like FileZilla), make sure you have one of the default themes in /wp-content/themes/ and delete your custom theme’s folder (for example, /wp-content/themes/customtheme/).  WordPress will see the active theme doesn’t exist anymore and it’ll fallback to the default theme.

View it in a browser.  Did that solve it?  If so, it’s your theme that’s causing the issue.

Re-Upload the Core

If all else fails, try re-uploading the core WordPress files (that’s everything except /wp-content/).