9 Ways to Fix WordPress Screen of Death (WSoD)

9 Ways to Fix WordPress Screen of Death (WSoD)

WordPress white screen of death (WSoD) occurs when a WordPress website loads to a completely blank screen with no explanation of the error. In some browsers like Chrome however, the 500 error is shown. It's common to find a white screen in the majority of web browsers. This error prevents access to the website visitors and sometimes administrators.

This error is frustrating due to the lack of information on the cause or solution to the underlying problem. The white screen of death being one of the most common WordPress errors, it's also resolvable when the root cause of it finally known.

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In this article, we'll explain what the WordPress WSoD is and what are the common cause of it to happen. Then we'll walk you through the 9 possible solutions to fix it and have your website up and running again.

 

What's the White Screen of Death?

As the name suggests, the WSoD is a WordPress error that instead of loading a web page, a blank screen is loaded. This error gives no information about itself and it has to be investigated thoroughly to get to the root cause.  

This error is often caused by two groups of factors. It is either caused by PHP code or PHP memory limit and it can also be because of faulty theme or plugin. These are two distinct factors that can cause the WordPress White Screen of Death.

9 Methods to Fix PHP White Screen of Death

When faced with this issue, the immediate concern is to get it fixed and have your website back. Before taking the steps towards fixing it, you might do some preliminary checks which could be useful to locate the problems.

• Recent Changes

  You can trace back the recent changes you've made which might be the root cause of this problem. Possible ones could be the installation of a new plugin or theme. 

• Email notification

  Checking your email for possible notification from WordPress about some potential issues.

• Developer tool

  Checking the developer tool on your browser. This helps debug webpages.

If none of these could tell why or fix the problem, then you might start troubleshooting the underlying cause(s) of the problem.

You can check to see if this White Screen of Death happens to everybody or just in some locations. If the website is up for some people, you might try to clear the browsers cache to load the newest version of the website.

If none of these is in the picture, you can start debugging with using the following debugging methods:

1. Check your error logs

   Logs are one way a developer gets feedback from his code/app. Web servers log things happening to the website called access logs and errors from the website called error logs. One of the first things to check is the error log file to see the errors the website is sending back. If you don't know where your error logs are located, ask from your hosting provider. At hey-hosting.com, the error log is right on the user panel and it can be filtered or downloaded. If the error log communicates the error, you can solve the problem by fixing what it states.

2. Memory Limit

   Most of the time, the WSD is caused by the memory limit of PHP running on your server. This is mostly because the default WordPress memory limit is 128 MB. This can be increased depending on the load of your website like media and scripts execution which might require more memory.  The memory value can be increased by editing the wp-config.php file.

   Look for the line that reads /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */ and add the following above it

   define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '1520M'); 

   Save and reload the page. If it solves your problem, voilà. Also, if you are hosting with Hey Hosting, you can easily update your PHP memory limit from our User admin page. 

3. Activate WordPress Debug Mode

   If at this level you still haven't had a solution for WordPress Screen of Death, you might take another step of enabling the debug mode of your website. This will spit the errors directly on the web browser and will point to where the error is coming from. If there are multiple errors, each will be printed on a new line.

   To enable debug mode, navigate to your wp-config.php in the public_html directory of your website and activate as so

   define('WP_DEBUG', true);

   changing the false to true activates debug and refreshing your page will show meaningful errors causing the WordPress White Screen of Death of your website.