As far as annoying malfunctions and glitches go, WordPress isn’t exempt from having a few that are quite dramatic. One of the most aggravating has to be the white screen of death, an error that leaves you stranded and unable to use your WordPress admin panel. As far as catastrophic errors go, this isn’t unfixable, and it doesn’t lead to losses of content. However, it impedes you from using your website. Also, the error can be specific to a part of your website, namely the WP admin panel, or it can be global, affecting the entirely of your website. The white screen of death can manifest in your admin panel or in some other area of your website.
As always, before making any major changes to your WP platform or attempting to do any fixes, backing up your data is crucial. So let us stress this: back up your data!
Why does this error occur?
Most often, the WordPress white screen of death is a glitch and error that is due to exceeding your memory limit. Your website resides on a server and that server allocates a certain amount of actual physical memory to running your website. Using certain plugins, certain plugin conflicts, or simply a poorly coded theme can lead to excessive memory usage, which will allow the problem to manifest. Also, there can be issues that are physical, that occur at the level of the hardware that hosts your website; an error on the server itself. One other thing is that the WordPress white screen of death can occur on a specific WordPress website of yours, or on all of them, which can be even more of a daunting experience.
So, let’s see how you can troubleshoot this issue.
Do you have enough memory?
Exceeding your memory limitations will cause WordPress white screen of death in many occasions. Therefore, check your PHP memory limits as a first step towards fixing the issue.
Disabling plugins
If increasing your memory limit is not possible and you want to make sure that WordPress white screen of death is not a hardware side issue, the first step to take is to disable plugins.
So disable all plugins and see if the problem is solved. If the problem is solved then you’ll know it’s a plugin issue. You can then restore plugins one-by-one and check to see if the problem manifests itself again. This way you can find out which of your plugins causes the issue.
Go back to a default theme
Not only can plugins cause an issue, but a modified theme can lead to the WordPress white screen of death. Therefore, a quick troubleshooting action can be to replace your theme with a default one.
But before you do, it is best to backup your original theme. You do this by copying your WordPress theme folder. A second way to do it is to visit your phpMyAdmin and update the tables in the wp_options table. You have to update all of the following: your template, stylesheet, and the current theme. The values are best set to twentyeleven.
Also, look into your theme’s functions.php file and see if there are any spaces at the end of the document. Functions that are coded incorrectly will not work properly and they will create issues for you.
Reinstalling WordPress
Sometimes the errors can be very tiny and cannot be easily located. In this case, a way to regain functionality is to re-install WordPress itself. The advantage is that this will clean the website of any errors and any corrupted files that are not immediately apparent.
WP also has a debug functionality that can be handy in these cases:
error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1);
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true);
The code can more easily prompt you to an area where code has been modified or to code that doesn’t work.
Also, when the front end of your WP website is not accessible, a common error is a caching error. Therefore, you should try and empty your cache and see if this fixes the issue.
Modifying your Php.ini file has also been shown to work:
/** Trick for long posts */
ini_set('pcre.recursion_limit',20000000);
ini_set('pcre.backtrack_limit',10000000);
This, along with an increase in your recursion and backtrack limit can fix the issue. The most frustrating part of the white screen of death is that it’s hard to pinpoint what caused it, and no automated tool can verify the entirety of your website and find out what the issue stems from. However, most of the time the problem will fix after just a few of those steps, but you need to be patient. Keeping track of the modifications done to your website is a useful way to diagnose what is more likely to have caused the issue.