One of the most annoying things for anyone is to visit a URL and be greeted with nothing but a white screen. When dealing with the “white screen of death” and WordPress sites, you will need to figure out the root cause of the problem in order to solve it. Thankfully, once this has been done, the fix often is simple.
Why does it occur?
The first step in diagnosing and fixing the “white screen of death” is to understand what it actually is. When you visit a site, you will simply see a blank screen with no content. It is important to give it time to load, as some sites require some buffering. However, if nothing ever appears, you are encountering the white screen of death. Fortunately, for advanced users, WordPress has a WP_DEBUG mode that will display what is causing the errors. If you do not understand those messages, you will need to know other methods of troubleshooting.
Common Culprit – The Plugins
Plugins can add a lot of character to a website, but they can also be a pain. If a plugin is causing the white screen of death, deactivating the plugin will end the blank page. There are a couple ways to go about checking the plugins. The first is to keep a log of your changes when working on your site, because this will give you the ability to see what change you made last before the site broke. This is extremely beneficial if you are editing the settings on a plugin or working in the code. You can simply undo the changes and have the site working again.
However, if this does not create an immediate fix, or you do not have a log of your actions, you can deactivate the plugins. You will then want to reactivate them one at a time to see which one is causing the problem. You can also use a FTP client to upload a clean plugin to your site to override the broken one. It is important that if you discover a plugin is causing a white screen, and you have done nothing to it, to report it to the author so they can work on bug fixes.
Broken Due to Code Error
Just as common as a broken plugin, coding errors break WordPress sites all the time. The most common form of breakage is seen as a parsing error. It is time consuming, but you will need to go through your code that you have been working on to see where the break occurred. Thankfully, you can upload a working version of the file so your site loads while you are working to figure out what changes in the code broke the site. This is why it is extremely important to always save a working file when you are working in the parent code, or create child themes so you do not mess with the main code.
Unfortunately, sometimes the white screen of death can occur for no reason. You may not have been working on anything when the site suddenly breaks. This is when WP_DEBUGmode comes in to find the other causes for the breakage (possibly corrupted or cached file), or lets you know that the server is down and you need to contact your web host.