White Screen on word press web site
Recently I installed a new WordPress blog by using the imporbuddy utility, but at the end of the installation it displayed only a White Screen and I could not neither view nor administer my new blog.
The installation seemed to have worked correctly, but the result was not successful. I made a few searches on the Internet and I found that this problem seems to be relatively common and there are quite a few suggestions to recover from the White Screen (sometimes referred to as Screen of Death) situation.
Today, most white screens of death are either caused by plugins or themes (theme functions can sometimes interfere with core WordPress functions). A way to immediately attempt to find the culprit, could be to enable debug mode, but even that can produce nothing more than a blank screen, so why not attack the problem head on?
White Screen Troubleshooting
There are quite a few different ways to solve the White Screen problem. I tried a few ones without success and finally I found one that solved my problem.
It consists of following steps.
- Open a FTP client
- Connect to Website FTP.
- Go to: <root>WP-Content
- Rename “Plugins” Folder to “Plugins_Old”.
- Create new empty folder called “plugins”
- This will disable all the WordPress plugins.
- Log into WordPress and verify that you no longer have the White Screen
- Make sure all plugins are disabled.
- Move the plugins from the plugins_old to the “plugins” folder you just created.
- Log back into WordPress and check that it works correctly
- Enable plug-ins one at a time to see which one was causing the issues.
In my case I noticed quite a few plugins that I did not require and avoided therefore to re-install them,
White Screen Other Possible Actions
During my search I noticed a few other suggested actions to solve the white screen problems and I list below a few of them.
- Rename the theme directory and try to switch to the default theme
- Add an entry define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’); in the wp-config-php file
