One of the fears of designers and administrators of web pages made with WordPress is to encounter the dreaded white screen of death, which leaves both users and administrators without access to the web.
The professional WordPress hosting services offer automatic backups daily and self-recoverable basis, which are the guarantee for complicated situations such as causing white screen of death.
The famous white screen of death
When accessing a WordPress website and obtaining a completely blank screen, without the content that the page should show, we find ourselves before the famous (and feared) white screen of death. This is a WordPress error that can have different causes and whose severity is that no information is received about what may be causing it.
In order to solve the white screen, you have to discard different causes, until the web is visible again.
Must Read: Most Common WordPress Errors
Causes of the white screen of death in WordPress
One of the first suspicions about the cause of the white screen of death should be towards incompatibilities between themes with plugins. For example, a plugin has been updated that is not compatible with the current theme of the page or a theme has been activated that is not compatible with any of the plugins.
When performing an update of the WordPress itself, some theme or plugin presents incompatibilities giving rise to the white screen. It is also possible that the white screen occurs due to incompatibilities between plugins.
Although not as common, it is possible that the cause of the white screen is the lack of memory. Hostings designate an amount of memory for each script that runs, and exceeding it results in a white screen error.
How to fix the appearance of the white screen
When obtaining a white screen of death error, a series of steps must be taken to solve it:
Disable plugins
The first thing to do is disable the plugins and check if the web is accessible again. Since there is no access to the administration panel, you will have to access the files on the server through an FTP program like Filezilla . You have to make a backup copy of the content of the plugins folder, and then leave it empty. After accessing the website again, it will be possible to check if the plugins were causing the white screen of death.
Disable the active theme
Another cause of the white screen may be the subject being used. To deactivate it, you have to access the WordPress files by FTP and search within the themes folder for a folder with the name of the current theme installed. This folder must be renamed or deleted as WordPress will activate a theme by default. Access the web again to see if it was the cause of the white screen.
Increase the memory limit of WordPress
You can increase the memory limit that WordPress uses to run scripts that use plugins. To do this, you have to access the server files by FTP and modify the wp-config.php file , search for the text string “ That's it, stop editing! Happy blogging ”, and enter the following code that will increase the memory limit to 256Mb:
define (WP_MEMORY_LIMIT, 256M);
Clear the cache
The hosting service provider can clear the cache files. It is not the most common cause of white screen but there have been some cases. Therefore you have to ask the provider to clear the cache and then perform the web check.
Restore Backup
The white screen of death is an error that usually has its origin, mainly, in the incompatibilities between plugins.
