White Screen of Death

Few things scare a WordPress beginner more than a completely blank page. No error, no message, just white. This is called the White Screen of Death, or WSoD, and it usually means a PHP error has stopped WordPress from loading.

The good news is that it is almost always fixable, and your content is normally safe in the database.

What causes the White Screen of Death?

Think of a car that refuses to start without showing a single warning light. Something broke, but WordPress cannot tell you what. The most common reasons are:

• A faulty or incompatible plugin, often right after an update.
• A theme with broken code, or a mistake you made in functions.php.
• Your site running out of PHP memory.
• A PHP version that doesn't match what your plugins or theme need.

Newer versions of WordPress try to catch these fatal errors. Instead of a blank page, you may see a short message about a critical error, and WordPress emails the site admin a special recovery mode link.

How to fix the White Screen of Death

1. First, check the admin email inbox for that recovery link. It lets you log in and pause the broken plugin or theme.
2. Next, if there is no email, connect via FTP and rename the wp-content/plugins folder to disable all plugins at once.
3. Now, if the site loads again, a plugin is the culprit. Rename the folder back, then rename each plugin's folder one at a time to find it.
4. Here, if plugins are not the problem, rename your active theme's folder. WordPress falls back to a default theme if one is installed.
5. Finally, increase the PHP memory limit or turn on debug mode to see the real error.

Our full guide on how to fix the WordPress White Screen of Death covers each method in detail. I always test plugin updates on a staging site first for exactly this reason.

The White Screen of Death looks scary, but a calm, step-by-step check usually brings your site back in minutes. Tell us in the comment box below which fix worked for you.