White Screen Fix Guide Tool

A blank page means PHP stopped executing and nothing was flushed to the browser. In almost every case the underlying event is a fatal error that PHP was told not to display, which is the correct production setting but leaves you with no clue on screen. The usual triggers are a plugin or theme calling a function that no longer exists after a PHP upgrade, a syntax error introduced by editing a file directly, memory exhaustion during a heavy operation such as an import or a backup, or an opcode cache serving a stale compiled version of a file that has since changed.

The status code tells you which family you are in. A blank page returning 200 is PHP dying quietly. A blank page returning 500 usually means the failure happened earlier, at the server or .htaccess level. A blank page that only appears in wp-admin while the front end works points at an admin-only plugin or a memory limit that is lower for admin requests than for front-end ones, which is common on shared hosting.

The fastest route out of a white screen is to make WordPress tell you what broke. Edit wp-config.php over FTP or the host file manager and, above the line that says stop editing, set WP_DEBUG to true, WP_DEBUG_LOG to true and WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY to false. Reload the broken page once, then open wp-content/debug.log. The last entry written at the moment you reloaded is your fault. Remove these lines once the site is healthy, because leaving debug output enabled on a live site can expose file paths.

If debug.log stays empty, the failure is happening before WordPress can set up its own logging. That points at the server. Check the PHP error log in your hosting panel, confirm the PHP version has not been changed recently, and look for a memory or execution time limit in the message. On sites with an object cache or opcode cache, restart or purge it before drawing conclusions; a stale cached opcode of a file you already repaired will keep the white screen alive.

You never need the dashboard to disable a plugin. Connect over FTP or SFTP, open wp-content, and rename the plugins folder to plugins-disabled. WordPress cannot find any plugins, treats them all as deactivated, and the site loads. Nothing is deleted and no settings are lost. Rename the folder back, and every plugin reappears as inactive; reactivate them a few at a time and reload after each batch until the white screen returns, which identifies the offender.

Themes work the same way. Rename your active theme's folder inside wp-content/themes and WordPress falls back to the most recent default theme it can find, so keep at least one Twenty-something theme installed for exactly this reason. If neither plugins nor theme changes anything, raise the memory limit temporarily by adding a WP_MEMORY_LIMIT define to wp-config.php, reload, and note whether the page comes back. If it does, do not leave it there as a permanent fix; something is consuming an unreasonable amount of memory and that is the actual bug.