Solution to WordPress Blank Screen of Death

As I posted last week, getting my blog hacked forced a wordpress upgrade to v2.5.1 however it also caused a problem I had previously been unaware of, the WordPress Blank Screen of Death. This is basically where under some circumstances, you get a blank plain white screen instead of the page you were looking for. In my case, I was completely locked out of the admin screens and could do nothing with the blog apart from post comments!

This post is going to take you on a journey, one that starts with following standard debugging techniques that I’ve learned from years of experience in the IT industry and ends in a discovery so surprising, it’s made me question the fundamental quality of the whole blogging phenomena that is WordPress (WordPress is the blogging software this crossfit blog uses and is arguably one of the most popular). I started off as anyone should when faced with a new and unfamiliar problem, by doing some research:

Get expert advice and hundreds of videos to build your own websiteWhat I found was that this appears to be a common WordPress problem suffered by many bloggers and can arise in many possible situations e.g.:

  1. After writing a comment and clicking Submit.
  2. Accessing any of the main blog screens.
  3. Accessing any of the administrator screens.
  4. After *doing* something in the administrator screens.

During the upgrade, I noticed I was suffering from (4) above. I could access the admin pages no problem, but whenever I tried to do anything adminy I’d get the Blank Screen of Death e.g. change a plugin setting or write a post or change anything. The action I was performing worked ok, but I’d have to hit the back button and do an F5 Refresh to see the results of it. At the time I figured I’d deal with it later.

It was made worse because there were no error messages: No errors on the wordpress white screen of course; nothing in the main wordpress error.log; nothing in the plugin error log; and nothing in the webserver apache error log. And in the absence of any information it’s a tough problem to debug. However, with my advanced Google Foo skillz, I was pretty confident of finding the answer. I did in the end, but it took me hours!

Here are all the causes and working solutions I found on the net that others have specified:

  • A partially complete upgrade – Solution: Re-upload the upgrade files.
  • FTP Client making a mess of the upgrade – Solution: Get a better FTP client and re-upload the upgrade files.
  • Something failed running /wp-admin/upgrade.php upgrade script – Solution: Find out what failed (check logs), fix it and re-upgrade.
  • Incompatible Plugin Enabled – Solution: Disable all plugins, then add them back one at a time to see which one causes the problem.
  • Adding the new define(‘SECRET_KEY’,… parameter into wp-config.php – Solution: Don’t put it at the end of your file, put it before the line that says /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Working down this list posed a problem: How could I disable the plugins without access to the admin screens?!? In the end I had to manually hack the MySQL database directly via the back end. In short, here’s what I did:

  • Accessed my webserver admin screens, cPanel in this case.
  • Accessed the phpMyAdmin MySQL user interface.
  • Browse the wp_options table.
  • Find the field called: active_plugins.
  • If you just want to look without the risk of cocking it up, here’s the SQL you need:
    • SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’ LIMIT 1;
  • First things first before you go fiddling: BACK UP THE VALUE OF THIS FIELD by copying to a text file on your PC.
  • Then either use phpMyAdmin to blank the value of the active_plugins field, or use this SQL:
    • UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ” WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’;
  • Just to be clear here, if you don’t know what you’re doing, then don’t do it! I’m not responsible for you messing up your blog even more. You should have regular backups and have proven to yourself that they work and you are competent enough to restore from those backups.

Anyway, that will disable all your plugins… great. Just one problem: it didn’t fix my Blank Screen problem!

I’ll cut a long story short, as it did take me another hour or 2 to finally find the solution. Now what I’m about to say is a complete shocker to me. As an experienced IT person, someone who has been messing around with and programming computers and working on IT projects in every possible role up to IT Director for over a decade, I am completely dumb founded by what I’m about to describe, because how the human race has got to 2008 with all the technologically related advances we have made, and yet still introduce a hugely powerful and popular program like WordPress, that is brought to it’s knees by the most innocuous of things… it’s just completely beyond me.

Anyway here is the answer: it lies in the wp-config.php file, this is the file where you set your database password etc (so you’ll forgive me for not using my own real one. 😉 ). This is the example file that comes with the installation:

— File Starts —
<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/
// to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.
define(‘SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
$table_prefix = ‘wp_’; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!

// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to ‘de’
// to enable German language support.
define (‘WPLANG’, ”);

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define(‘ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__).’/’);
require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);
?>
— File Ends —

That is a perfectly fine, normal and working wp-config.php. Now I’m going to show you a broken one. One so terribly horrendously broken, that it causes you to be locked out of your workdpress blog for half a week and lose 1/2 a day trying to solve it. See if you can spot the difference:

— File Starts —
<?php
// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase. You won’t have to remember it later,
// so make it long and complicated. You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/
// to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.
define(‘SECRET_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’); // Change this to a unique phrase.

// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
$table_prefix = ‘wp_’; // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!

// Change this to localize WordPress. A corresponding MO file for the
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to ‘de’
// to enable German language support.
define (‘WPLANG’, ”);

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define(‘ABSPATH’, dirname(__FILE__).’/’);
require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);
?>

— File Ends —

What do you think, can you see it the mistake that breaks the whole blog? No? Go back and look closely…

Still no? Ok ok, I’ll give it to you, here’s the problem:

What? You can’t see that either? Let me show it to you again, look carefully this time:

You getting it yet? Yep, it’s an empty line. That’s all it is. 1 single solitary NewLine at the bottom of the file, right after that ?> a Carriage Return & Line Feed in programmers speak. That’s it. You hit the Enter key in one wrong place and the whole pack of cards comes tumbling down! Shocking, just shocking. Let me be crystal clear, it’s this bit here:

?>

— File Ends —

Now of course, the Analyst in me wants to know how this happened and I’ll tell you. The issue was the the new define(‘SECRET_KEY’… entry I mentioned before. That should have been my warning, because when I was following the upgrade instructions, they don’t tell you where to put it, so naturally I first put it at the end of the file…. yep you guessed it: AFTER the ?> . I realise now of course that was stupid and it didn’t work. What was the symptom of it not working? You guessed it: the WordPress Blank Screen of Death. This can also happen in your theme’s functions file. Make sure you do not have any “extra” returns after your last ?>

But when I moved it to the correct place, I was still sporadically getting problems, then I commented the line out and basically with all the changes I made I seemed to have got myself into the situation where I was getting the problem, but only half the time. I reckon the currently open admin session I had going was probably masking half of the issue from me. But in putting it at the end of the wp-config file and then moving it, I must have left behind an empty line. How silly of me! So just make sure you have no extraneous characters after the ?> I’d recommend checking for those evil and nefarious spaces too. 😉

There are 2 things I’ve done which not only dramatically reduce the headaches that WordPress gives me, but gives me access to something that’s absolutely vital for ensuring a good WordPress / Life balance! The first is to get the Thesis Theme. Nothing good in life is free and (at the time of writing) the Thesis theme costs $164 for a multi-site licence, or a more modest $87 for a single site. This site uses the Thesis theme and I have to say, I’m be super impressed with how easy it is to customise to get it exactly how I want it. But even more, there are literally thousands of Thesis websites devoted to helping you, and that’s not to mention the really impressive members only support forms. Hit any problems, and rather than spend time searching the web, you’re sure to find help there. Highly recommended.

Learn to Customize Thesis Like a ProGetting the Thesis theme may seem like an unnecessary outlay when there are many free WordPress themes out there, but I can honestly say it’s be the best investment I’ve made on this site. I’ve yet to have a single problem or crash since using the Thesis theme, it’s so easy to use and the wealth of help out there is astonishing. Rick from the Build Your Own Business website for example has over 700 tutorial videos covering everything you’ll ever need, and private coaching available if you really get stuck. As they say, prevention is better than cure. Highly recommended.

Anyway, that’s the fix and probably the most comprehensive study of getting wordpress blank screens anywhere on the net. If you find this post useful, please consider linking to this post from your blog, it will help others find this article who may have the same problem.

{ 297 comments… add one }
  • Diane Vigil 8 July 2008, 11:49 am

    Yep. That falls under the “stuff happens” scenario. Been there.

  • Roanoke VA real estate 8 July 2008, 6:54 pm

    Dude, bless you. You just saved me a lot of friggin hassle. I guess my google foo helped me fine you! Cheers and many thanks!

  • Charco 9 July 2008, 12:49 pm

    bloody brilliant – I just spent the best half of eight hours trying to sort this out. I’ve been in and out of the database, up and down the MySQL and permissions ladder…

    All I can say is THANK YOU VERY MUCH

  • Kathy 10 July 2008, 12:50 am

    I’m getting the blank screen problems after editing/managing/creating a ‘page’ (but I can post a regular entry just fine) – but I’ve never done the secret key bit… but the repair is usually replacing the wp-config.php file just as you describe. I’ll watch for an extra empty line, but it doesn’t make any sense to me. Great work, though!

  • Colin McNulty 11 July 2008, 7:00 am

    > STOP SPAMMING THE FORUMS

    Dude, when I was trying to find the solution to my own problem, I went through the Wordpress forums in detail and found many MANY people with the same problem and hardly a soul helping them. I resolved to go back when I was done and post replies to all the people that needed help but hadn’t received it.

    If I was spamming the forums I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t have needed to if so many people hadn’t had the same problem and not received help from anyone else.

  • jasper 11 July 2008, 7:44 am

    man i have this same problem at my website..
    http://www.maddecent.com
    if anyone can help us solve it we can compensate
    thanks!

    jasper.goggins@gmail.com;

  • Alex 12 July 2008, 11:30 pm

    Hiya,

    I have the same problem, but after first install… not much help from wordpress support forum (instead of a reply, one of their lovely moderators closed my thread because he’d mistaken me for another user).

    I had a look for that infamous last line and sure enough, it was there. Removed it, still no joy.

    Any ideas where the bug could be? I use Dreamweaver’s built in ftp.
    Thank you!

  • Colin McNulty 13 July 2008, 8:51 am

    Jasper and Alex, I would suggest a reinstall / re-upgrade process. There are many things that could be wrong, just start again and work through slowly.

  • Lee 15 July 2008, 4:49 am

    I’m having this problem when I try to run install.php. I have tried completely reinstalling from a fresh installation without any luck (two or theree times). I have also tried your suggestion, but it didn’t work for me. Also, I have made the following observations:

    1) The original wp-config-sample.php file has the extra carriage return at the end! So this is very unlikely to be the real cause of the problem, and as I said, it didn’t work for me.

    2) I have PHP error logging enabled, and I got the following error each time I loaded install.php:

    PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING in [URL removed for security reasons]/wp-admin/includes/media.php on line 154

    Hence, the problem would actually appear to be with /includes/media.php.

    Interestingly, line 154 is blank – just a carriage return. I’m going to try removing it and see what happens. Or maybe there’s supposed to be an “else” or something there. Any PHP experts here?

    Anyway, it appears there is some kind of error in the 2.5.1 version of /includes/media.php.

  • Lee 15 July 2008, 8:58 am

    Well, I’ve been messing around with 2.5, 2.5.1 and the just released 2.6, and no matter what I do, when I try to install any of them, I get the same blank screen and the same PHP error from /wp-admin/includes/media.php. The only difference with 2.6 is that the error now occurs on line 197 (I’ve discovered that my text editor counts the lines differently from WP, so I’m no longer sure which line this actually is).

    However, I noticed 2.3.3 and earlier didn’t have this file, so I decided to try installing it. Voila! It works!

    So I was obviously installing it correctly, but there is clearly a serious bug in the code of /wp-admin/includes/media.php (from WordPress 2.5 upwards).

    As this file relates to the new admin interface, it explains why some people are getting blank admin screens after upgrading to 2.5 and later, while other people (like me) simply can’t install it in the first place.

    I am going to need some very serious convincing that this bug has been fixed before I even consider “upgrading” to a newer WordPress version.

    2.3.3 has the extra carriage return at the end of wp-config-sample.php BTW, so I am quite convinced tha this is not the real cause of this issue.

  • Colin McNulty 15 July 2008, 7:28 pm

    The plot thickens…

    To be honest there are always going to be sporadic problems with an install base as large as WordPress, but the lack of error reporting and handling is a shame.

  • Michael Liu 18 July 2008, 9:07 am

    Hey Man, You really has done something great, it works.

  • Simon 18 July 2008, 6:09 pm

    I had my share of blank page distraught.
    See my write-up at http://simos.info/blog/archives/706

  • John Miller 18 July 2008, 8:26 pm

    Not working for me. My wp-config.php file is fine – no extra space, everytime I try to post and click submit, it goes to the …/post.php file and locks up at a blank screen. I thought that maybe is was a chmod permission problem. I’m about ready to just uninstall/reinstall.

  • Ap 18 July 2008, 9:54 pm

    For what it’s worth: try to set your theme to the base theme. Worked in my case.

  • hanjra 18 July 2008, 11:28 pm

    Hi, can you please tell me how to deactivate all the plugins in wordpress 2.6. I dont see the above mentioned string (command) in the wp_options table.
    My problem is that whenever i try to login, i get blankscreen. I cant do anything to get in. please help me.

  • hanjra 19 July 2008, 12:00 am

    Thanks god, the problem has been resolved. it was all due to a plugin. I deleted the recently installed plugins using ftp client and now i can login and get into dashbaord.
    I am telling this for others help.

  • Colin McNulty 20 July 2008, 6:38 am

    Plugins are often causes of this problem it seems. One of the things I tried was to move all my plugins out of my plugin folder via ftp.

  • Dan McComb 20 July 2008, 11:39 pm

    Thank you! I lost about an hour trying to figure this bastard out, and after removing the extraneous line break in the wp-config file, it worked all dreamy. You rock.

  • Marty Martin 22 July 2008, 4:17 pm

    I just started having this problem again today and I notice now that in FTPing to the site, the file has been chown’d to 99 99 instead of the correct owner/group of user1/group1

    I wonder if there’s a way to look in the logs and find out what script did that and track the problem that way?

  • Howe 1 August 2008, 4:05 am

    You have a page this size for explaining it was a blank line ?
    You must have plenty of time for blogging.

    This was a bug, fat waste of time, and of course it didn’t help at all.

  • The Blog Idea 1 August 2008, 8:07 am

    In my case only a few of the user blogs get blanked. Please suggest.

  • The Blog Idea 1 August 2008, 8:14 am

    If you click on some of the links to the user created blogs, the pages appear blank.

  • Kyle 1 August 2008, 12:24 pm

    Thanks for the effort. Reloading all of the files worked like a charm.

  • The Blog Idea 1 August 2008, 9:24 pm

    My problem of blank pages was solved by logging in as admin on my wordpress mu blog and clciking on “upgrade”

  • Colin McNulty 2 August 2008, 6:08 am

    > Howe said,
    > You have a page this size for explaining it was a blank line ?
    > You must have plenty of time for blogging.

    Not really, but I put effort into subjects that either I care about or bother my greatly. Losing access to my blogs admin screens bothered me greatly.

    I also discovered that there were loads of other people out there with the same problem and helping others solve the same problem I’ve solved, is something I care about.

  • Bengt 2 August 2008, 9:20 pm

    I got blank screens on some of my blogs after upgrading but not on others. It worked with the standard themes like Classic or Sandbox but not with my own themes. My problem turned out to be caused by some extra spaces in those themes functions-files.

  • Tim 10 August 2008, 3:22 am

    Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I would have never discovered the problem.

  • Steve James 10 August 2008, 3:32 pm

    I had the blank screen after comment submit problem. No errors reported, no logs, nothing.

    Above, Ap said set the theme back to Default. Out of desperation, I did so, but didn’t expect this to help. What’s the theme got to do with submitting a comment? Well it worked!

    I was using the Orange Techno theme; no plugins, fresh 2.6 install. Geesh. Wordpress is a breeze to set-up but the diagnostics are pants.

  • Niaomi 13 August 2008, 9:26 pm

    I’ve checked my config file and it doen’t have a gap, it isn’t broken. I’ve also delated all my plugins but my screen is still blank after I make changes.

    Any help appreciated.

    I am so design orientated, I cannot bare this!

  • Colin McNulty 14 August 2008, 5:24 pm

    As you will have discovered Niaomi, there are many reasons for the Word Press Blank Screen of Death, you just have to keep taking things out till it suddenly starts working.

  • Sam Hooker 19 August 2008, 9:15 pm

    Pardon my saying so, but isn’t the issue you’re describing more of an issue with the PHP interpreter (Apache mod_php, in your case), rather than the codebase? I mean, it seems like the problem is PHP bailing without sufficient error handling (i.e., posting a message in well-formed HTML to the browser). Sure, it’s sloppy code if the WP upgrade script is appending a spurious newline to the config file, but the greater failing here is that of the interpreter. IMPO, anyway…

  • Jeremy 19 August 2008, 9:25 pm

    Hi Colin,

    Thanks for your write-up. I read your post, and seeing as how you noted that cleaning up the active_plugins field didn’t fix things, I skipped it. Silly me. My problem was IN that active_plugins field. My host actually helped pinpoint it. Not sure how it happened, but the last plugin folder contained in the serialized list had an address that looked like this: ‘../../../../../[about 20 times]../tmpZnlkjP/something…’ …It looked like junk.

    I carefully reviewed the entire contents of the field in a text editor, and stripped out that reference. Once I had done so, voilà! My site was back online again.

    So if someone else is reading this,

    DON’T SKIP DISABLING ACTIVE PLUGINS VIA THIS METHOD OR ANOTHER.

    -Jeremy

  • Sam Hooker 19 August 2008, 9:48 pm

    Colin,

    I appreciate your posting, too. Unfortunately, in trying to troubleshoot my upgrade to 2.6.1, the issue was the fact that I hadn’t copied over an alternate theme (into …/wp-content/themes). If folks get this far in your process and are still at a loss, I’d encourage them to look into whether they’ve brought over any alternative themes that may have been in use. Thanks to the folks posting to http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=9168

    Cheers,

    -sth

  • Anthony 20 August 2008, 10:38 am

    My problem started when I installed a few wordpress themes and started testing the look and feel. I lost everything – admin panel- the lot. I cant rem which one caused the blank screen but when I went into the themes folder I just deleted all of the themes bar the default and all was restored.

    Jusy incase that helps anyone….

  • Mel 1 September 2008, 5:54 pm

    Re-upload wp-includes foler and that will fix the blank admin page problem. I haven’t narrowed it down to which file is causing the problem but I know 100% it’s inside the wp-includes folder.

  • James 5 September 2008, 10:43 pm

    Thank you so much!! My issue was simple, I just activated a wordpress plugin that was not compatible, so I had to go into my FTP client and delete it. I was freaking out. The whole reason I was working on one of my older blogs was because an article got picked up by stumbleupon and I was trying to capitalize. I jump on there and I still have Wordpress 2.1 running. I want to get it up to par so I need to update. I try starting out with one of those one-click back-up plugins and boom, everything is white. My site is a blank screen, my admin is a blank screen, everything.

    Luckily I googled “wordpress blog sunddenly blank screen” and I found this up near the top. Your blog gave me a solution to my problem in less than the standard 96 seconds most readers spend on a page, and for that I thank you!!!

  • Colin McNulty 9 September 2008, 8:24 pm

    Thanks for the comments guys & girls, it’s nice to know this post has helped people. If any of you fancy giving me a back link, feel free. 😉

  • Aaron 11 September 2008, 5:14 pm

    Hello Colin,

    Great article. A few questions:

    We are having similar problems with http://www.marksdailyapple.com. White screen of death at seemingly random times. Some browsers show the site while others don’t at all (WSOD) and comments don’t work. And here is the kicker it isn’t the same browser on different computers that it doesn’t work on. For example, it won’t display on FF3 at work but will on my computer at home.

    In our panic effort to fix the problem the first time we re-uploaded all the wp-includes files. This fixed the problem temporarily (for about a week). Since then we have narrowed it down to a single file – kses.php in wp-includes. That is, if we have the WSOD and re-upload that single file the site functions normally again… for awhile.

    We have the latest version of WP and and about a dozen different plug-ins.

    Also, and this may be the most relevant bit of info, we recently moved our site to a new host. Our last server was hacked. The hackers were able to get into our files, add hidden text, and also redirect our URLs to spam (mostly porn) sites in search results. This problem was, ostensibly, fixed by our developers but with our trust in our old server lost we jumped ship. Ever since then the WSOD problem has been happening (started about 3 or 4 weeks ago and has happened about a half dozen times now).

    Our WP developers can’t seem to find a solution. They’ve thought it is some weird cache problem. They are now telling us the root of the problem lies with our host.

    Any thoughts, suggestions or help would be appreciated.

  • Colin McNulty 11 September 2008, 9:25 pm

    Hmmm that does seem to be a mystery.

  • Aaron 15 September 2008, 5:16 pm

    Update:

    This was our problem –

    Logic on the timing of the issue seems to point to a problem with something on the server. In doing some more research into your new server’s config, there is a PHP optimizer called eAccelerator that seems to be causing segfaults with wordpress. Here is the bug report:

    http://eaccelerator.net/ticket/216

    You may want to ask the host to check into this and either disable it or find a work around. This is a high probability due to the eAccelerator bug with the kses.php file.

    We disabled eaccelerator and the problem has stopped.

    Cheers!

  • Colin McNulty 15 September 2008, 7:23 pm

    Wow, that’s an esoteric cause indeed!

  • Bjørn 22 October 2008, 8:41 pm

    Hello! i tried WP for the first time today, after installing i can manage my page in dashboard, but my page is blank. non of the above helped me:S

  • Lee Kemp 25 October 2008, 6:32 pm

    I’m getting the blank screen but i’m not upgrading, i’m simply failing miserably at my first installation. I’ve checked for the blank line and i’ve tried uploading with a different ftp client.

    Any help much appreciated.

  • sharon 22 November 2008, 8:54 am

    There are other reasons this can happen that are not WP’s fault, you know. The white screen can be a sign that you’re running out of PHP memory. That’s something that will appear in your server logs, and it basically means you have a cheap web host that is setting the PHP memory limit very low. After some messing around I managed to get an existing installation to upgrade. But I can’t install a new WP database. I can’t install Mediawiki either: same blank screen. I’ve also had problems with a different PHP-based program at the same site. The ‘support’ staff tell me there’s nothing wrong. (And the crucial difference between the support at my web host and the WP support is that I pay my host.) Looks like I’ll be moving to a new web host in the near future.

  • PT-LawMom 6 December 2008, 6:40 am

    You are awesome. Thank you SOOOOOO much!!! 🙂

  • MarkS 31 December 2008, 2:38 pm

    You saved my blog. Thanks!

  • Fort Lauderdale SEO 13 January 2009, 10:39 pm

    I have had this problem for a very long time … The thing is … I have the exact same WP theme and files on other servers without a hitch … however, the admin area gets whiteouts for various reasons when I have more than one plug-in activated … I have heard the “canned” solution a hundred times

    “upgrade WordPress”

    It does not help … I have no idea why the theme would work fine on one server and completely whites out on another …

    I have no idea why this issue persists after trying every suggestion given …

    For What It’s Worth … WordPress doesn’t appear to be very stable …

    That’s my 2 cents ..

  • Kelly 19 January 2009, 2:27 am

    I had a problem with viewing errors, so I added:
    php_flag display_errors on

    to the .htaccess file.

    Then I saw that there were files missing on my server. Seems like my wordpress upload decided not to complete its job!

    I walked through and added the missing files (such as some media.php and admin.php ones) and then it worked!

  • Luke 24 February 2009, 9:08 pm

    This saved me big time! My site was down and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what caused it. Thanks a ton!!!

  • Philip Arthur Moore 3 March 2009, 7:10 am

    Thanks for the excellent writeup. I’d say the first thing to check for after any upgrade is the extra carriage return in wp-config.php. I just had the white screen of death and a quick check yielded the extra space at the bottom of that file. Clean that up before trying anything else!

  • Alexwebmaster 3 March 2009, 9:21 am

    Hello webmaster
    I would like to share with you a link to your site
    write me here preonrelt@mail.ru

  • Colin McNulty 3 March 2009, 8:50 pm

    No worries Philip. Alexwebmaster, all links are welcome.

  • lordjz 13 March 2009, 5:04 am

    After trying all suggestions above, the only thing that worked immediately for me was to manually delete the plugins that I had installed. Deactivating them wasn’t enough. Its good to list them (numbered as you install and activate them), then you will be able to delete them sequentially one by one (starting with the last), until the screen of death goes away.

    Sorry cannot post my blog url as yet because I still have to get a new Domain name.

  • Zak 14 March 2009, 12:36 am

    Thanks a ton man! My Wordpress 2.7.1 powered blog was just completely crippled due to that one extra space. The odd thing was that I didn’t do any recent upgrades. All of a sudden my admin area just went blank. I owe ya a beer, or six,

    Cheers,
    Zak

  • Colin McNulty 15 March 2009, 9:47 am

    Lol, no worries Zak. A mere mention and link back from your blog is all the thanks required.

  • Mike Adams 16 March 2009, 9:00 pm

    Thanks, Colin! After moving my site to a new host, I suddenly had the white screen of death when I would log in. I couldn’t do anything!

    Sure enough, there were two blank lines at the end of the wp-config.php file. I deleted them and everything works again.

    Cheers,

    Mike

  • mal haskins 18 March 2009, 8:35 pm

    AHHHHHHH!

    The single line white screen of death in the config file …

    Mi Amigo – thank you for posting up this informaiton – you saved my day!

  • Mike 27 March 2009, 9:09 pm

    I just spent 2 hours uploading and reuploading the wp files, all the while ignoring my recently updated config file. Thank you so much for finding this. You just saved me a weekend of frustration!

  • RaiulBaztepo 28 March 2009, 10:46 pm

    Hello!
    Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
    PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language 😉
    See you!
    Your, Raiul Baztepo

  • PiterKokoniz 7 April 2009, 11:22 pm

    Hi !! 🙂
    I am Piter Kokoniz. oOnly want to tell, that your blog is really cool
    And want to ask you: will you continue to post in this blog in future?
    Sorry for my bad english:)
    Thank you:)
    Piter Kokoniz, from Latvia

  • Matt 10 April 2009, 9:45 pm

    Another tip – you can try renaming all of your plugin folders through your ftp client. change ‘foldername’ to ‘foldername1’.

    I did this and it solved the white screen issue.

  • Andrew 15 April 2009, 4:31 am

    wow it works, thankyou thankyou, i thought it might spend hours looking for this!

  • Ben Q 24 April 2009, 3:21 am

    I just fixed this issue differently. I got the blank screen of death after jumping from an upgrade from 2.3.3 (or so) to 2.7. I went in via FTP and deleted the current theme, was able to login, and change the theme to another one, and wah-lah, it now works.

    Fun stuff! 🙂

    Wordpress still rules.

  • MMcD 28 April 2009, 9:11 pm

    You are so right – I got the blank screen after messing around with the function.php file in my theme – I was doing really well, but then all of a sudden I got the blank screen any time I edited a page or post and then clicked update – this happened to me before and I started fresh (a real time waster). However, doing a google search came across your article here on it…and I reckoned I must have messed up the function.php file when I was trying to add some stuff to it…..sure enough at the very end there was a lovely line space before the final ?>

    I removed the linespace and then tried to edit and update a post and voila no more blank screen.

    so be careful when adjusting those important template files…………….
    thanks for sharing your post

  • Colin McNulty 16 June 2009, 8:26 pm

    Thanks for everyone’s thanks, it is appreciated. Link backs are also appreciated. 😉

    Someone hold my hand, I’m about to upgrade to Wordpress 2.8… I’m just stepping outside, I may be some time!

  • Kristina 19 June 2009, 11:20 pm

    I got the white screen on my main wordpress blog page after changing web hosts and they moved my account for me. I assumed it was something regarding the new installation but didn’t know where to look. The wp_config.php file seemed fine. Turns out, after reading the comments here, I went to the admin theme manager (typed the url directly) and lo and behold, there was a notice at the top of the page that the current theme was broken and it was reverting to the default. Well that obviously wasn’t working, so I selected another unmodified theme and wow, back to life. Funny thing is, when I then selected the same modified theme I had before, it worked just fine.

  • Ricker 1 July 2009, 6:09 am

    I had this same blank page disaster post-upgrade to 2.8.

    My solution, however, was not to delete the extra lines (although my wp config and some other files DID have the extra line….)

    The problem for me was the PLUGINS. Some were not compatible with 2.8 and i can’t believe that it could just BLANK OUT the entire site, INCLUDING the admin area!

    To solve this problem.. (using an FTP program) i renamed my “plugins” folder to “plugins_old”. Then I reuploaded the default “plugins” folder from the wordpress install files.

    Voila! Blog is back!

  • Abhijeet Patil 1 July 2009, 5:03 pm

    I tried all possible ways to fix this award winning issue… lol … and tried this. . Go to your phpmyadmin edit table (wp_xx_options)

    Method 1:
    If your ( template & stylesheet fields are showing ‘str’ value ) edit them and make default and default . That works …

    Method 2:

    Execute this code paste it in index.php

  • Abhijeet Patil 1 July 2009, 5:04 pm

    … Execute this code paste it in index.php

  • Abhijeet Patil 1 July 2009, 5:05 pm

    $updatetemplate=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’template’;;
    mysql_query($updatetemplate) or die(“Could not update template”);
    $updatecss=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’stylesheet’;;
    mysql_query($updatecss) or die(“Could not update css”);

  • Abhijeet Patil 1 July 2009, 5:07 pm

    some corrections in method 2:

    Execute this code paste it in index.php

    $updatetemplate=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’template’;
    mysql_query($updatetemplate) or die(“Could not update template”);
    $updatecss=”update wp_options set option_value=’default’ where option_name=’stylesheet’;
    mysql_query($updatecss) or die(“Could not update css”);

  • Katy 27 July 2009, 2:41 pm

    Oh my gosh, you helped me fix my problem. After activating a bad theme, my whole wordpress installation went blank. I investigated the wp-config.php file and sure enough, it had the extra carriage return in it. After removing the carriage return, I was able to get back into the wp-admin pages, then re-activate my theme that does work.

    Thank you SO MUCH!

  • Colin McNulty 27 July 2009, 5:56 pm

    Always a pleasure, never a chore. 🙂

  • Pissedoff 30 July 2009, 8:03 pm

    People are going nuts trying to get this crap wordpress working and you are playing games. What a bunch of crap.

  • Colin McNulty 30 July 2009, 8:50 pm

    Huh? What do you mean I’m playing games?

  • jack 7 August 2009, 5:18 pm

    This is undoubtedly a helpful article.

    I don’t think that its helpful for the author to have made such a big deal of the problem and made out that wordpress is particularly to blame or unique in suffering from it however.

    This wordpress error could undoubtedly could be handled better, but dynamic web languages aren’t like desktop languages usually in their error handling and feedback methods.

    The WSOD (white screen of death) is something that happens from time to time in nearly all PHP applications. Yes wordpress could no doubt accommodate it better, but I defy you to find any CMS in existence that has no user reports of WSOD’s. If there is a syntax or logical error in the scripts then the server running PHP will display nothing – a white screen. Its harder to deal with these kind of errors as your script will never get to the part where it tries to handle such errors as it will already have stopped running and all the user will see is a blank page.

    This is no news at all therefore.

    What you have here is useful advice, not any sort of revelation of cutting criticism about wordpress

    In my view your article is unnecessarily sensational.

  • Dobra 8 August 2009, 11:00 am

    Hello, I think everyone who has a wordpress blog had problems, I do not think there is someone who did not! I have not ever had problems that they can not do .., but I: can not insert media in its pages and in any post, because when you may want to upload media, you no longer appears as a window on the same page but I transferred to another page for “uploads”, here I can upload normal media, pictures appear in the gallery, but when the button “insert into post” a white page, but with the correct page that I want to insert the picture. I want to mention that “dashboard” in “quickpress” I can upload pictures in html.
    Thanks a lot everyone who can help me.

  • Colin McNulty 10 August 2009, 6:23 pm

    Hi Jack, thanks for the considered comment.

    > In my view your article is unnecessarily sensational.

    You may well be right, but 90% of the content is about the problem, how to diagnose it and how to fix it. If there was a small measure of sensationalism, it was a reflection of my emotional state at the time: frustration for the issue in the first place and finally relief that it was all over.

    Assuming that even a very generous 10% of the people who visit this page actually bother to comment, then this post has helped over 100 word press users. So all in all, I’m happy with the content.

  • Paul 14 August 2009, 10:05 am

    Just a little something to add here. In my case, there was an extra space at the end of the wp-config.php file, but removing that (or carrying out any of the other steps described here and elsewhere) did not fix the problem.

    I remedied a WSOD that occurred with a Wordpress-based site I was developing by identifying a problem with the theme’s (not the universal WP files) functions.php file. I had added a few lines of code there to enable styling of the wp-tag-cloud output, and this broke the CMS/admin. Any admin action, beyond navigating around the admin pages, would produce a WSOD. Perhaps due to caching, this didn’t occur immediately after adding to the functions.php code, so the reasons were not obvious. Removing the added lines of code from functions.php didn’t fix it either – I had completely replace the theme’s functions.php file with the ‘classic’ theme functions.php file to fix the problem. Adding ‘my’ extra lines of code back to this version caused no problems, and it’s all up and running successfully again.

    Thanks for a thorough post on this subject.

  • Hrannar Baldursson 24 August 2009, 9:14 am

    I changed the name of my plugins folder to plugins_old and created a new empty plugins folder. Resolved the problem.

  • David 3 September 2009, 9:58 pm

    Jack…. Your comment

    ?The WSOD (white screen of death) is something that happens from time to time in nearly all PHP applications. Yes wordpress could no doubt accommodate it better, but I defy you to find any CMS in existence that has no user reports of WSOD’s.

    I have to agree that in so far as PHP based systems are concerned that this has happened to me regularly. I found out that simply messing around with WP with only one or two demo posts etc. and switching between themes will tcause this. In particular I found that it was Woo Themes that invariably caused it without fail. Dealing with any of their free materials is like being a snake handler… eventually you WILL get bit. I can’t say about their paid themes but if even a free version is any indication then I’m staying the hell away.

    I have used a Perl based CMS called Big Medium and I can honestly say that not once, not ONCE with dozens of test sites have I ever encountered this grief. The only drawback for a non coder/designer such as myself is that there is a lack of themes or plug ins with all the eye candy. If there were more I would forego the evil siren song of Wordpress and all other bells and whistle PHP/MySQL systems and sail into safer and infinitely more stable waters.

    Sensationalism on the original topic? Not in the least. WP is frankly at the very root… messed up. I find that the WP defenders of the faith, like those who pimp Joomla, or those who drink the Kool-Aid of other PHP based CMS or forums garbage, don’t realize how much blood sweat and tears it costs to fix this stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I like WP a lot. I really do. Its just that I realize its an unfaithful mistress and will stab me in the heart without so much as a thank you.

  • Colin McNulty 5 September 2009, 7:39 am

    > I like WP a lot. I really do. Its just that I realize its an unfaithful mistress and will stab me in the heart without so much as a thank you.

    Lol, that’s a great line David! WP stabbed me in the heart again this week. WSOD reared its head again, this time without any obvious cause. The last time I touched the site was to post, I checked the post was visible and went to bed. In the morning: just a sea of white on the public blog (admin pages were still working).

    3 hours I lost that evening trying to workout what was wrong. I could find nothing in any log files to give even a clue as to what was wrong. That’s my biggest complaint, nothing to go on. In the end, I resorted to simply re-uploading the core files and that mysteriously fixed it. Barking. :-S

  • Chris Adams 5 September 2009, 6:39 pm

    I’ve been having recent struggles with the WSOD on WP 2.8.4 and have linked it to two troublesome plugins: Twitter Tools 2.0 and Digg Digg 1.8. Specifically I was having issues with editing posts, creating posts, and even erratic WSOD’s when browsing my sites using Safari 4. Too bad because I like these plugins quite a bit.

  • Dawn P 8 September 2009, 2:51 pm

    That blank line can also cause problems at the BEGINNING of the file, just FYI – that’s where mine was. THANK YOU for this post!!

  • grentuu 10 September 2009, 10:16 am

    3 days of pain. Installing deleting, reading php files. The carriage return did it thank you.

    Where I kept going wrong (duh!) was I kept trying to reload my site instead of trying to load the admin page. As soon as I did that and reinstalled the default theme back and running.
    Thank you

  • Ann 23 September 2009, 3:00 am

    … I have had so many WSODs now, I am on the verge of giving up on WP altogether. I set it up some months ago to play, then WSOD reared its ugly head. Then did a local install and started testing there – all went well, then all of a sudden, WSOD appeared. Just went back to my ‘live’ install today, and remarkably I could access the admin area – but then mistakenly (because it seems this causes lots of problems) I clicked on the upgrade link, and everything is back to the WSOD again.
    Since I didn’t have anything of note in the database, I killed everything, deleted the database and all files, and started again with a fresh upload of WP3.8.4. But – now I get the WSOD just trying to get to the install.php file! Guess there’s something wrong at the server end, but I am just stumped at how difficult this is.
    Has anyone found a really good host for WP who makes sure it works, and/or will help if it doesn’t? And/or, any ideas at all as to how to fix this most frustrating problem at the install level?
    Any thoughts most appreciated.

  • Ann 25 September 2009, 12:08 am

    I have now been advised by my webhost that (at least for the WP install problem) it was a permissions issue. Apparently they have PHP installed as CGI and not an Apache module, and the permissions need to be 755 not 644.
    I have asked them if that means I have to change the permissions for all files downloaded with upgrades and/or plugin/them installs, but haven’t heard back yet – but this could explain why things went haywire when I downloaded various plugins and the upgrade.
    Anyway, I now have my site up and running (www.beheart.org), and will give WordPress more of a go.
    Hope this can help others who are experiencing the WSOD wierdness.

  • Jackson 1 October 2009, 3:38 pm

    Thanks for this post. I found it not in my wp-config.php file, but in my theme’s functions.php file.

    Also interesting to note, in my case it was two carriage returns, tested with only one and no WSOD.

    Thanks again.

  • Lenny23 10 October 2009, 1:56 pm

    My feeling is that it is to low php memory cache of the server adjustment.
    Wordpress requires huge memory cache and when the server is under pressure it simply crashes and shows a blank white page. Therefore no error message, it is like choking the server down.

  • Nic 14 October 2009, 12:08 pm

    Thanks so much – the active_plugins sql fixed my blank screen of death. I had removed the blank line last week, but was still locked out.

  • Beshoy 20 October 2009, 7:55 pm

    Thanks for the info, clearing the active_plugins fixed it!!!

  • Brian 25 October 2009, 4:50 am

    For me it was removing the blank line AND the ?> at the end of the file. While looking at a sample wp-config file for the latest version I noticed that it no longer had the ?> at the end of the file. Once I removed that I was in…

  • rc 31 October 2009, 9:31 pm

    I had the same problem, but you gave me the idea to check an error file. Luckily my MAMP server keeps one and pointed me to an updated section in my functions.php file. Thanks!

  • Warden 3 November 2009, 1:23 pm

    Ok, here’s my story Colin McNulty!
    I am using Wordpress 2.8.5 and this peace of crap is so full of bugs that it makes me rip my hair out.
    It is not a plugin problem because I have disabled all of them and the problem still persists.

    Your method from this article does not apply to 2.8.5 because the WP-CONFIG files is a bit different and anyway I don’t have an empty line as I checked it and compared it to WP-CONFIG-SAMPLE file from a fresh downloaded WP archive.

    Can this be a theme problem? How can I fix this? I can’t even publish articles and I also have another error. I can’t upload pictures because I get “IO error.”

    What in the world is wrong with Wordpress 2.8 series???

    And…
    P.S. There is no such thing as the “human race”. The mass media invented that term but biology clearly says that there is the human species (homo sapiens species). Race is something different to species. There is the Caucasoid race, the Negroid race, the Mongoloid race…

  • Colin McNulty 3 November 2009, 7:28 pm

    Hi Warden,

    Sorry to hear you’re having trouble. I can’t offer much advice that isn’t already written down here, either by me or others that have had the same problem. I would suggest, in this order:

    1) You rename your plugins folder (like deleting it, but you can put it back).

    2) You change back to the default theme and delete or rename the old theme folder, to similarly rule it out.

    3) You re-copy the WordPress files to your webserver, to make sure that nothing has been corrupted or hacked. Make sure you get the right version!

    4) If none of that helps, you see if you can find a WordPress professional to debug the problem, but you’ll have to pay for this of course.

    Good luck.

  • Pius 5 November 2009, 9:07 pm

    Thanks Colin.
    When one of my friends was faced with this (blank admin page) problem and called on me for help, I realized I couldn’t access the admin panel. I could get to the login page but once I enter the username and password, the blank page comes up. The trick I used to get in was to go directly to one of the admin pages, (i.e. http://www.your-domain-url/wp-admin/edit.php)
    With this I was able to get to the dashboard. The problem I found was with the permalink setting. The site wasn’t configured to use anything else but the Default setting because it doesn’t have mod_rewrite enabled.
    Changing it from “Day and name” to the default took care of the blank page. Now I’ll have to help him figure out a way to enable it as long as he’s going to pay me to do that…:-). After all, this is what I do for a living at http://www.jpacglobal.com
    Again, Colin, you did an awesome job with your explanation.

  • Kurt 7 November 2009, 7:10 am

    I just delete the active_plugin table and the page can be load
    than I activated again the plugins selected in dashboard

    Thanks Colin, you awesome, my page can play again… 😀

  • LOL 17 November 2009, 2:53 am

    Thanks a ton, my friend. Deleting the empty line fixed it for me.

    I was starting to panic when none of the commonly recommended troubleshooting steps helped. But thanks to you I only wasted 10 minutes.

    Cheers!

  • Dr S K Verma 20 December 2009, 6:03 pm

    Thanks man! You saved my life!! Weeks of hard work was going to be lost. I had a backup of wp-config.php file just before I installed Ultimate Google analytic plug in. I restored that file and thats it. I could see my lovely dashboard again!

    This plugin is probably not updated to WP2.9 (latest version.

    Thanks again!

    sunil

  • Kumar Sekhar 22 December 2009, 7:04 am

    Great article dude !!! It’s save my life.

    Thanks again!

    Cheers!
    Kumar Sekhar

  • Jarrod1937 30 December 2009, 10:17 pm

    Thank god for your post… I switched the host config for the db from localhost to an ip… and all of a sudden everything worked but the backend! Made absolutely no sense. That is until i found your post, and guess what?! That indeed was the cause, good job finding such a minute detail.

  • Grateful in CO 31 December 2009, 12:20 pm

    The! Empty! Line!

    *takes deep breath*
    *takes ten more*

    Yes, that was it. So what if I have less hair now than when I started trying to fix this problem for my client who tinkered with their blog? Your post saved the day, and from the looks of it, has been doing so for lots of people, routinely, for over a year now.

    Many, many thanks!

  • Tony 29 January 2010, 11:16 am

    Unfortunately none of these solutions are working for me.

    I did a bulk upgrade of some plugins, including Twitter Tools (running WP 2.9.1 by the way), then clicked on the Upgrade option again, and it sat there. I cancelled, and am not sure if it started to upgrade or not, it should not have done as I am up to date, but I then got the WSOD.

    I tried removing the blank line – no change. Tried renaming the pligins folder – no change.

    The ONLY page I am able to get into is http://www.delovesto.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and all this does is tell me that my WP is already up to date, and back into the WSOD again 🙁 I can’t get into the Login, Admin, Edit, Post etc pages.

    So thanks for the help, it has at least taught me a few things, but so far hasn’t fixed the problem for me. As usual, it’s probably something really obscure, simple and stupid that is causing this.

    I tried running the MSIE8 Debug option, but nothing comes up. The screen is blank and the scripts don’t show.

    Wish me luck…

  • Austin 29 January 2010, 4:09 pm

    This can also happen in your themes functions file. Make sure you do not have any “extra” returns after your last ?>

    Solved my problem anyway. thanks.

  • Colin McNulty 30 January 2010, 4:58 am

    Sounds like a tough one Tony. I’d suggest somehow a file has got corrupt, doing a reinstall of WP might help. This has worked for me after a WSOD during an upgrade.

    Thanks for the tip Austin!

  • Leo N 13 February 2010, 6:36 am

    An unclosed tag in the theme functions.php caused the problem for me. Thanks for helping me get on the right track!

  • Greg Malkin 23 February 2010, 10:25 am

    I fixed the problem simply by deleting the extra lines I had accidentally added at the end of my function.php file

  • Bradley 19 March 2010, 4:34 pm

    The hosting company doesn’t help. I’m working with a client’s site on Earthlink (ouch, ooh, oomph) and blank page. Finally moved all of the plugins out of the plugin directory for a minute, tried to log in, it worked, then put them back in. Was a stalled auto-upgrade to 2.9.2.

    Some companies shouldn’t do hosting, they should stick to whatever it is they do best.

  • Nigel 20 March 2010, 4:38 pm

    Deleting the active plugins through PHP MyAdmin worked perfectly for me, thanks for this, saved me a huge headache man!

  • wow 27 March 2010, 3:02 pm

    Spaces in the functions file. Incredible. Thanks for the tip!

  • Jenna 5 April 2010, 6:41 pm

    Thanks. Found it in my functions.php file. Wouldn’t have believed an extra linefeed could cause no Admin area pages.

    You saved me a lot of time! Thanks again.

  • Seth 14 April 2010, 3:05 am

    this is the first time I have ever commented on a blog…

    Fantastic work man, Fantastic work.

  • David B 3 May 2010, 6:30 am

    I just wanted to leave a post and tell everyone who has posted here in the past that I am down on my knees in thankfulness. I got the Blank Screen of Death after installing and activating the WP Backup plugin. After 5 weeks of working 10 hours a day on a site redesign, moving from a Dreamweaver site to WP, I was 30 seconds away from entering a panicked state of hyperventilation after the blank screen appeared. But instead I decided to Google, and I found this forum. When I saw a couple of comments here by people who had success through removing a recently installed plugin or two from the plugins folder via FTP, I thought, “This could be MY answer,” and though it seemed way too easy and far too good to be true, i tried it. IT WORKED!!!! Thank you, Thank You, Thank You. I never would have solved this on my own, and my redesign is schedule to go live in 24-48 hrs. May abundant blessings shower upon you all, and I hope someone else can find their answer here. People taking time to help people, for no other reason than to offer a helping had, is a wonderful thing.

  • Colin McNulty 3 May 2010, 7:35 am

    Hehe, it’s always nice to see a happy camper David. 🙂 Very glad we could help. If you want to help others find this post, feel free to pop a link back from your blog.

  • Richard Baldock 12 May 2010, 11:12 am

    Reset to default theme and back again, worked like a bomb !! : )

  • Gavin 16 May 2010, 4:19 am

    I had a completely different problem but you sent me on the right path so I just wanted to say thanks..

    Mine was a line in my functions.php file that was calling a function on a plugin that I hadn’t yet installed.

    It was working perfectly on my test site which is what got me so confused… easiest fix is to remove everything in the functions.php file and see if the blank screen of death is resolved and then start adding the calls back slowly

  • Thomas Pedersen 21 June 2010, 3:17 am

    I had the problem all over my site incl. the admin-
    Read around for a few things, and tried out somethings, but eventually found that it is the wordpress backup plugin that caused it. The funny part is that I only installed it, because I wanted to update to WP3 and it then had a link to the plugin for me to make a backup before updating it.

    Anyway. The plugin is now deactivated, and I made a backup through my ftp program.

  • Ryan Wofford 30 June 2010, 8:05 pm

    I had the white screen of death after updating to WP3, just as Thomas Pedersen indicated… including admin pages. I couldn’t access anything. Tried the extra space fix (my wp-config DID have an extra space at the end, but it didn’t fix the issue).

    In the end, I think the problem was the Podcasting Plugin by TSG doesn’t seem to be compatible.

    Thanks for the tip, though… seemed to work for a ton of folks!

  • YouLin 2 July 2010, 9:51 am

    Same as others, I am the victim of the latest WP ver3.0 upgrade. Troubleshooting/trying most of the solutions provided on the net for days, but still can’t solve the “Blank Screen Of Death”. Thanks for the sharing, I did find so of my add-on domain config.php without the last ?> And I have added in.

  • Colin McNulty 3 July 2010, 7:26 am

    To be honest, I haven’t yet installed the latest WP v3. I just don’t have the time right now to deal with it if it fails. I’m going to wait till the first couple of bug fix releases come out.

  • Andy Bird 7 July 2010, 9:00 pm

    I have one client who is suffering form the same problems.. when I looked into it he had been hacked an addional code had been added to each php file which called an exploit.

    If you see any weird code this could be your problem

  • Lauren Schwaar 7 August 2010, 6:05 am

    Oh my word. I’m saved. I can’t tell you how glad I am that what seemed to be an insurmountable wordpress problem could be fixed with two tiny characters. I looked at my wp-config file first and when that didn’t work, I was almost crushed but then I saw your edit and fixed my theme’s functions.php file — it was like a miracle had occurred! I would send you money or chocolates or something, but firstly I’m a broke college student and secondly I don’t know where you live. Anyway, keep doing good in the cyber-world, batman!

  • Bhaskar News 9 August 2010, 9:02 pm

    Yes, Solved .

    thanks, it’s a adsense manager & tweetmeme plugin who are responsible i delete theme & now it’s showing.

    Thanks agian 🙂

  • Dan 14 August 2010, 9:48 pm

    I experienced this on one of my WPMU sites and it was driving me nuts.
    Only, when I looked at my wp-config.php file, it was entirely different. Instead of having a blank line at the end, it had a ^M character at the end of each line as though the file had been edited in Windows and ftp’d back to Linux. In vi, I just did a :1/^V^M$// and saved it and the blank screens seem to have gone away.

    But your trip put me on the right track and saved me a lot of heartache!!!

    Thank you sooooooo much!
    Dan

  • bohonkey.com 25 August 2010, 5:46 am

    My issue was wordpress was pointing to a theme that was missing. downloaded/installed a new one and bye bye white screen.

  • starry 31 August 2010, 11:37 am

    Thanks so much! This has been driving me crazy. All anyone ever said is it must be a plugin. It was not a plugin!

    Thought I might add the whole last line of my file was missing. There was no end to the phrase at all. How does that happen??

    Thanks again

    Starry

  • jon 9 September 2010, 5:55 pm

    Thank you for the info on turning off the plugins with phpmyadmin. I had the white screen for the login page after I moved an old blog to a new host. After turning off the plugins that way I could at least get into the backend of the site.

  • Chris 12 September 2010, 12:37 am

    Your post helped me figure out that support for my host provider added a blank line to my htaccess file. The support person had made a change that fixed one problem, and created another (white screen of death).

    Thanks for taking the time to post your story! It saved my a**.

  • dan 14 September 2010, 1:16 am

    and 1 more thank you to the list. head bruised, blood pressure up.

  • Ilocos 2 October 2010, 1:50 am

    I will keep you posted if this works on my site. I have been experiencing this problem. Earlier I have had to access my wp-admin just to clear the blank screen. I also had the suspicion that it could be related to the reloaded cache plugin.

  • Surendar S 14 October 2010, 12:26 am

    WOW man…. very close… not the space at the end…
    “?>” itself is missing in my case… fixed.. thanks 🙂

  • jehzlau 20 October 2010, 10:40 am

    @Surendar S – that’s weird. Mine is missing as well. But it didn’t solve my problem. O_O

  • Dave 24 October 2010, 8:19 pm

    My closing PHP tage was missing at the end of my wp-config.php file, too. However, adding it didn’t keep my newly-activated plug-in from causing the Blank Screen of Death when clicking “update” or “add new” which in my case would blank out the editing areas. I’m just glad I was still able to deactivate the plug-in to clear things up. Too bad. The plug-in looked promising.

  • Akram 28 October 2010, 6:16 am

    Thanks Dear ! i solve my problem by clearing active plugins field.

  • Noah 2 November 2010, 12:45 pm

    Dude thanks.

    Option 1 with the database plugins fixed a botched upgrade.

  • Gan Juan Yao 15 November 2010, 3:12 am

    THANKS it solves the problem =)

  • Syed Muhammad 22 November 2010, 2:09 am

    Dear sir, thanks for the great solution. I want to share another method of the blank white screen of death. This method is easy to follow. Here http://petuaterbaik.kaer-media.org/2010/11/solved-blank-white-screen-php-fatal-error-allowed-memory-size-of-33554432-bytes-exhausted/

    hope this help people out there.

  • Joakim 22 November 2010, 1:49 pm

    I just had the white screen of death as well and like you, the problem was with the wp-config.php file.

    However, I hadnt added anything or even amended the file recently, apart from changing the mysql password. But the WSOD and password change was not correlated.

    What was there however, was two extra blank lines. ?> was on line 41 while there were 43 lines in the file. Removing those two last lines fixed the problem.

  • nam 10 December 2010, 10:22 am

    This has caused me hours of pain and suffering… but, good thing I came across your site because I NEVER would have thought blank lines could cause so much of a problem. My experiments:

    1. My wp-config.php file was missing the closing PHP tag “?>”. I inserted it. NO RESULT

    2. The wp-config.php file had a blank line (above the missing PHP tag). I deleted the blank line. NO RESULT

    3. I found a great number of blank lines in my themes functions.php file. I deleted the blank lines. BINGO! NO MORE WSOD! AND EVERYTHING RUNNING SMOOTHLY… so far!…

    Unbelievable that some blank lines could create such chaos! Surely the PHP interpreter should be able to handle this and pass it to the browser as ‘irrelevant’.

    As Jack said (post August 7, 2009 at 5:18 pm)

    “This wordpress error could undoubtedly could be handled better, but dynamic web languages aren’t like desktop languages usually in their error handling and feedback methods… If there is a syntax or logical error in the scripts then the server running PHP will display nothing – a white screen. Its harder to deal with these kind of errors as your script will never get to the part where it tries to handle such errors as it will already have stopped running and all the user will see is a blank page.”

    I await to see if my site continues working after removing the blank lines in the functions.php, or whether this was just a fluke and the site will come crashing down again with the WSOD. If that happens I shall give up on WP, web design and anything to do with computers and go and live in a cave on a moutain to comtemplate my sinful past!

    nam

  • Bodhi 13 December 2010, 8:52 am

    Just wow, WSOD scared me to death as I spent about 5 hours straight working on my blog then it died when I updated it. However it was an easy fix with this post and all the helpful comments. Thank you so much and I will never for the lesson i learnt today. BACK UP YOUR WEBSITE REGULARY!

  • phil 7 January 2011, 5:20 pm

    Once again another web designer saved by this post. I had some spaces in my functions.php. Thank you mr McNulty! saviour of the White screen of Death!

  • Matt Smith 3 February 2011, 3:33 pm

    You saved my life.

    This should become part of the Wikipedia support centre. The PHP hack was invaluable!

  • Adrian 8 February 2011, 11:32 pm

    Who would have thought? You have saved me much aggravation! For that I thank you!!

  • Eryx 14 February 2011, 1:43 am

    Thank you very much!

  • Eric E. Johnson 21 February 2011, 2:37 pm

    Big time kudos to you. Thanks to your post, I’ve unscrewed-up my theme functions.php file. I wrecked it – unbeknownst to me – inserting code for Google Analytics. Then I got the blank screen of death whenever I tried to log in to wordpress. After removing unneeded line returns, as you advised, I regained administrator access. Thank you for explaining this for everyone. It may have taken you days, and it may have seemed like your time was wasted, but thanks to your sharing the solution with everyone, you’ve saved me and a lot of other people a lot of frustration and labor.

  • Dallas 22 February 2011, 1:19 pm

    Kudos dude,
    this just happened to me, I’ve been working on it for ages with zero progress:
    Thanks heaps for the last note about this also happening with your functions file! 1 blank line and my whole site was a white screen including WP-admin
    Thanks heaps

  • Pablo 24 February 2011, 7:23 am

    I just had the WSOD and this page helped by getting my head working properly on the problem. My install seemed to go fine but the white screen came up after updating plug ins.

    I first tried the wp-config file line space fix and didn’t fix it.

    I manually moved all plugins to another folder and started putting them back in one by one. The problem on my end is definitely the “wp-stat-dashboard” plug in not working with the newest version of WP. A shame as I really find it useful! Tried deleting and downloading fresh but no dice. Will just have to wait until that plug in gets an update i guess.

  • Pankaj 24 February 2011, 7:48 pm

    Oh my god…
    this is something hearth breaking situation..
    Wordpress white screen of death, this situation occurs in my website http://www.fundugadgets.com 2hrs ago and i am shocked.
    This problem occurs after i have upgrade my wordpress to 3.1, after the update process ends i just refresh my website and what i saw that i appears white page and i am shocked what is this…??????
    After this i am going to search about this problem and i found this article and other articles too..
    after this all i found that one plugin wp-supercache is not compatible with this new version of wordpress, when this plugin activates. The white page of death occurs on my website and i renamed it and now everything is fine.
    My blog is working fine now.
    This is the worst experience i have ever had in my life..
    God save me.
    All the best to all bloggers. 🙂

  • Colin McNulty 24 February 2011, 8:35 pm

    Pankaj, that can’t be true, as I am running WP Super Cache on this very blog and I upgraded to v3.1 a few hours ago without problem.

  • comingofage03 28 February 2011, 11:32 pm

    Okay, So today I got the blank white page. I installed a plugin last night and this morning…Voila!

  • John 2 March 2011, 9:44 pm

    Thanks for the reminder as I knew the problem was to do with white space/carriage returns but I was thinking it was at the start of the document and not the end and I couldn’t remember which file it was!

    Thanks again for the help as I am currently developing a new WP theme and I can crack on now.

    Cheers!

  • Sonja 4 March 2011, 8:40 am

    Thank you for the most common reminder of all, “Check you config.php file!” Several WP Blogs later and that never gets old. Never saw the white screen of death until 24 hours ago and there I was solving it some 15 hours later. A call to my HOST and they were only able to tell me it was a WP issue and that they don’t provide that support. Not once did someone say, “Maybe you should check your config file” and there my errors were right in front of them!

    My initial error in MySQL was “Cannot load mcrypt extension. Please check your PHP configuration.” Once I stopped looking so hard for that and focused on the white screen I came across this blog and sure am glad I did! Thanks! Several plugins removed and other WP Blog deletions on my server I fixed the issue with the help of a simple config file reminder…WOW smh ~Remember people, “Troubleshoot, troubleshoot, troubleshoot!” Never rule out anything.

  • WEBnME2 6 March 2011, 10:23 pm

    This happened after upgrading to WordPress 3.1 where the plugin DB-cache-reloaded no longer worked. It continued even afer disabling the plug-in. It seems that after this other flaws that had not surfaced, did so quickly.

    Thanks for the article. I checked after a white screen of death and found that the closing php tag was missing from my wp-config.php file and that there was one blank line with three spaces in my functions.php file. Fixing those via ftp to copy down, edit and copy back up appears to have fixed the problem. Time will tell whether I have it right.

    It also seems that after a change it takes a few seconds for things to take so to speak and that we as developers are prone to mash the reload button on the browser right away. Sometimes waiting a few seconds to reload helps on a slow or over-taxed server when the other problems do not exist.

  • WEBnME2 6 March 2011, 10:30 pm

    This is really for Colin and can be deleted (not trying to spam here – just show appreciation) – was impressed with the article and so put a reference to it on my blog article about the plugin issue at http://blog.webnme2.com/?p=3872

  • Colin McNulty 7 March 2011, 6:55 am

    Thanks WEBnME2 (your mother must have hated you, right? 😉 ), much obliged for the link back and I’m glad my post helped.

  • Max Williams 11 March 2011, 2:32 pm

    In case anyone else googles here like i did (and reads this far down) – in my case the blank screen of death was because i’d taken the password off the root user account in mysql, but left the old password in my wp-config.php file.

  • Funwidmasti 17 March 2011, 8:05 pm

    thnk you so much for this i am scraching my head since last 2 days..!!!
    thank u..!!!

  • Stage and Cinema 29 March 2011, 4:39 am

    I was ready to shoot myself. This was rich, globby white-death-icing on the cake of a monstrous week of things doing nothing but going wrong.

    Unfortunately, I should have done a final test right before trying this, to see if the White Screen of Death had magically vanished on its own accord, but I didn’t.

    I indeed saw a blank line at the bottom of wp-config.php (and yes I’d been in the file earlier in the day, but was only looking and didn’t make any changes — I certainly didn’t add a line at the bottom (or did I?)). Deleted it, saved it, went back to the site, reloaded, and it was fixed. A rush of relief.

    But then to test, I put the blank line back in, saved, back to site, reload, and it was still fine. Now I WANT the White Screen of Death, dammit!

    Then decided to leave well enough alone by re-deleting the line, saving, putting away the gun, taping patches of hair back on, and now, over an ENTIRE hour later, the site’s still up!

    Having saved it from the jaws of death, I think this means that my site is indebted to you for the rest of its digital life. What is your first wish, sir?

    In the meantime, thank you SOOOOOOOO MUCH!

  • pb 21 April 2011, 11:58 pm

    thank you thank you thank you!!!
    thanks for taking the time to post this. wish I would have found this sooner- I just spent countless hours researching and trying to fix this problem.
    Well I removed all of the extra lines in the functions file for my theme and that took care of the problem.

  • Sadat Malik 15 May 2011, 2:49 pm

    Thank you for sharing this information – I found that it also can happen if there are trailing whitespaces at the end of the functions.php file, after the closing ?> tag. I removed the whitespace from functions.php and all is well again in Wordpress land! This should definitely be on the top 10 things can go wrong with themes and linked from the WP codex.

    Legend. Thanks again.

  • Maro McLean 17 May 2011, 8:11 pm

    This post has saved me more than once!!! Just saved me again, on ly this time it WAS my theme functions file which I was adding custom traxonomies and post types. Now that WP 3.3 allows this I bet this isssue will become more prevalant as we are all messing around in the functions.php

    Keep a back up of your original php so you can check… also my WP install came missing the last php tag! AND an extra line.

  • brut 26 May 2011, 5:48 pm

    Thank you all!
    As a side note: the ending ?> in theme functions.php (and config.php as well) should be omitted!!!

  • Michael Soriano 30 May 2011, 8:04 pm

    thank you. solved my issue.

  • Udeshika 9 June 2011, 12:55 am

    thank you after sleepless night I got may homepage

  • dozza 12 June 2011, 10:24 am

    Does the wp-config.php file still end like that in v3?

  • Colin McNulty 15 June 2011, 10:28 am

    Hi Dozza.

    I’ve just looked at my wp-config.php (I’m running v3.1.3) and it does appear that the ending has changed and the closing ?> is missing, so my file now ends:

    /** Sets up WordPress vars and included files. */
    require_once(ABSPATH . ‘wp-settings.php’);

    Does this mean that a trailing space will kill the blog as it used to? I don’t know, nor am I brave enough to try it! 😉

  • brut 15 June 2011, 10:41 am

    just loose ending ?> in both wp-config.php and theme functions.php and you’ll be safe

  • Dozza 15 June 2011, 2:42 pm

    At least that confirms i’m not alone!

  • SanDiegoTim 18 June 2011, 2:12 pm

    Thank you for this post. Solved my problem which occurred after I made some changes to the functions.php file.

  • schmoukiz 25 June 2011, 11:44 am

    Thanks a lot! The advice helped me regain access to the admin area.

  • Greg Barrow 29 June 2011, 5:25 pm

    Thanks a lot! The advice helped me regain access to the admin area.

  • Ali 20 July 2011, 1:37 am

    Thanks.
    ?> and editing functions.php works for me.

  • luke 21 July 2011, 7:20 am

    SOOOO DIDN’t WORK!

  • Sandy 23 July 2011, 2:43 am

    YOU ARE THE MAN !!! thanks

  • Mike 25 July 2011, 10:29 pm

    Help, I have just installed wordpress 3.2.1 which was working fine then installed WP-Ecommerce 3.8.5 and as soon as I activated it the admin page went blank. Checked the wp-config.php and functions.php and made sure that their was no ?> and still doesn’t work.

    Any ideas?

  • Colin McNulty 26 July 2011, 7:00 am

    Hi Mike, I’d have though uninstalling that WP-Ecommerce plugin was your first step. Assuming that fixes it, try reinstalling the plugin (maybe the ftp upload didn’t quite work correctly the first time). If that breaks it again, I’d get on to the plugin creator. Good luck!

  • Mike 26 July 2011, 8:51 pm

    Hi Colin, thanks for the reply. I have tried everything including a total reinstall of wordpress and the plugin. Put out lots of posts as well to see what the issue is but never got a reply.

  • Alistair 8 August 2011, 5:50 am

    Legend. Thanks you just saved my sanity.
    A blank line. really? arghh.

  • Kristen 10 August 2011, 8:19 pm

    Waaaaaahhhhh — so I am NO WHERE NEAR as technologically capable as you are and most of what you wrote looks like an entire different language to me…

    Are you available for hire to fix the white screen of death FOR ME – I don’t have time to learn how to be an IT person help!

    kristen@marketingmerge.com

  • Colin McNulty 11 August 2011, 6:56 am

    Sorry Kristen that’s not my bag. The guys at Wordpress Central Station should be able to help you out. If you get no joy, post back up here again.

    Colin

  • Claude 16 August 2011, 6:38 pm

    My blank page problem was hard to find because I had nothing whatsoever in HTTPD error_log file. I have 2 Web servers but WordPress was working properly only on one Web server:

    1. In the file wp-config.php, add a line right after the line like “<?php" :
    error_reporting(E_ALL); ini_set('display_errors', 1);

    2. In the same file, also enable debug :
    define('WP_DEBUG', true);

    3. Go to your WordPress site on both servers and check the debugging info that is output in your browser.

    4. I found out that the Simple Lightbox plugin was not loading on the defective Web server. So then I disabled the plugin in WordPress.

    5. I can now see the exact error message that is causing the blank page! The blank page problem was because of :
    PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 23068672 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 32 bytes)

    6. In PHP.INI, I increased the value from 22M to 32M (33554432) :
    memory_limit = 33554432

    Then it solved the problem!

  • giberamp 25 August 2011, 10:22 pm

    you are a saint! i was screwed. just deleted the two extra lines that had appeared at the end of the file and like magic i’m back in business. thanks for sharing… and for making it so i could find your post through a google search.

  • sharad k 6 September 2011, 5:04 pm

    this is the best info i have got till date.,

    damn i was getting blank screen and i just added this

    @ini_set(‘display_errors’,’On’);

    to wp-config.php

    and bam it directly showed me which plugin was causing issue.,

    thanks a lot.,

  • Darwin 14 September 2011, 4:05 pm

    Wow thanks a lot!

  • Gavin McBride 22 September 2011, 7:30 pm

    Just FYI to anyone getting the blank screen of death, I was testing Wordpress in my localhost server on my home PC and was getting it too. The solution for me was that my APACHE server in the httpd.conf file read:

    DirectoryIndex index.htm

    And I was getting either blank screen of death or just directory listings. I changed this to:

    DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.htm index.cgi

    and after a restart of Apache everything worked perfect. Hope this helps someone somewhere!

  • Chris Bell 1 October 2011, 6:05 am

    You just saved my ass! TY!

  • Webgirl 3 October 2011, 12:44 am

    After having this happen to me yesterday, I was tearing my hair out until I found Colin’s article. I tried everything on this page, and then I read WebnMe2 who said:

    “It also seems that after a change it takes a few seconds for things to take so to speak and that we as developers are prone to mash the reload button on the browser right away. Sometimes waiting a few seconds to reload helps on a slow or over-taxed server when the other problems do not exist.”

    Ahhhhh of course! I remember now, IT IS IMPORTANT TO WAIT a few minutes or more after making a change like this, to allow the server to do its thing.

    I went one step further, I waited overnight and just returned to my site, refreshed, and voila! All has been restored, yayyy!

    Thanks to Colin and everyone else who posted on this page, much appreciated!

  • Steven Brown 7 October 2011, 6:55 pm

    Hey I love you man in a manly way! 🙂

    You have just saved me endless hours.

    I didn’t know where to start.

    Infact my hosting server provider sent me on a wild goosechase – banging on about MY SQL query limits!

    Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou!

    Have a good weekend!

    Steven

  • Justin Harold 14 October 2011, 11:15 am

    Was a plugin issue for me. Went through the plugins folder and renamed each folder in there until the issue was fixed.

  • corinna 17 October 2011, 2:26 pm

    I tried your correction and I still have a blank screen. I can’t seem to find my theme functions page and I didn’t deactive all plugins. Is that useful?! If you could help be more specific with how to do so as well, because I was pretty stuck. PLEASE HELP! I need my site back <3

  • corinna 17 October 2011, 2:37 pm

    Also, I installed wordpress from my softolous or whatever and it’s not even showing there. Now it’s all gone. Completely. I’m going to go insane.

  • WEBnME2 17 October 2011, 3:50 pm

    Corinna you must be very frustrated. From what you have described, your issue may be more complex and require the assistance of your web host to at least get your WordPress install visible and stable. I think that you have to address getting a stable install first that you can see from your host’s tools/control panel. Then you should be able to use those tools, WP-Admin, or ftp to see the functions.php file in your theme’s folder.

    This is usually at …/wp-content/themes/themename/functions.php Within WP-Admin it may be called Theme Functions with (functions.php) below it when viewed from the Appearance/Editor.

    Not all web hosts do a good job of handling WordPress. Some have proprietary installs that use different directory structures or older version of WordPress. Some may name wp-content as WordPress-Content which causes all manner of problems. I just moved about a dozen WordPress sites from one of these not so good hosts to a better one and was amazed at how many issues were fixed by having the WordPress install following the codex. I’m not associated with and have no interest in this host, but it does a very good job of handling WordPress –> HostGator.com and after a weekend of setting up WordPress and restoring sites, I have to give them a thumbs-up. Great tech support too.

  • Colin McNulty 17 October 2011, 9:44 pm

    I think I’m going to have to call in a favour. Any of you bloggers understand the ins and outs of integrating a wordpress blog with a Facebook page via a facebook app?

    I’ve *nearly* got it working as I want, but am stuck on how to link it all together so that when someone likes any page on the blog (not this one btw, a different one) they are actually liking the Facebook page and so will get future Facebook messages from the page.

    I’d really appreciate it if someone with a bit of experience in this area could spare me 20 minutes to talk me through it please.

    Thanks in advance,

    Colin

  • WEBnME2 18 October 2011, 2:25 am

    Your intentions are probably to help your visitors, but this could backfire on you. One thing that I would suggest to you, Colin, in order to avoid alienating users, potential legal issus for misrepresentaion, and breach of the FB TOS is to use a subscribe button instead of a like button with a legend asking the user to subscribe to get more information via FB. Then it is clear what is going on to the end user. I know that if I saw my picture on a page in FB saying I liked it when I never had visited the page, I’d be complaining to FB about abuse and misrepresentation. While some users might accept it as a convenience after that fact, I think there are a lot that might well get upset.

  • Colin McNulty 18 October 2011, 6:53 am

    Hmmm, you make a good point WEBnMe2. Certainly it wasn’t my intention to do anything underhand, I was just hoping to tie a website and FB page together for convenience. Perhaps a separate subscribe button is the way to go.

    Are you suggesting that would just link to the FB page, or can you Like a FB page directly from an off FB site link?

  • Teena 18 October 2011, 10:20 am

    Hey Colin,

    If I’m understanding what you’d like to do, I think you want to put a FB LIKE button on your blog so folks can like the content and also become part of your FB followers/family.

    Let’s see if these do the job …

    I just added two different FB buttons to two client sites yesterday. One has the FB ‘like’ at the top of the page, the other one is the FB logo linked to your FB ‘page’.

    Very straightforward Wordpress.org plugins, easy to install, and highly recommended 🙂

    I found these by searching for plugins within the WP Dashboard. The first one is :

    Facebook Like Button v1.9.6 by http://blog.bottomlessinc.com

    The second one for the sidebar (which links to many social media places if required) is:

    Repost.Me Social Icon Links by Darkain Multimedia

    Happy to help you out, as you saved my bacon a while back, and you’re so very helpful to everyone who found your site whilst looking for a solution. Give me a yell if you need to.

    Cheers
    Teena

  • Colin McNulty 18 October 2011, 2:46 pm

    Thanks Teena, sadly it’s not quite as simple as that.

    I already have a WordPress facebook Like plugin that I did have working, via a Developer App ID, that is linked to a Facebook page (I know it’s linked because if I un-publish the facebook page, the Like button stops working and returns an error).

    BUT I set the wrong category on the facebook page and it seems impossible to change a category once it’s set. So I’ve created a new facebook page with the correct category, but now I can’t work out how to create a Developer App ID for the new page to link to the Like button. Even though (as per WEBnME2’s suggestion) I’m happy for the Like button on site, not to be liking the facebook page.

    I hope that made sense!

  • Dave P. 21 October 2011, 8:48 am

    If I had any hair, I’d have pulled it out by now. I’ve been through so many websites trying to find out how to fix the white screen…

    Tried everything on this page. Nada.

    Now I’m not a coder, but I can follow directions fairly well. Discovered a really weird reason why I had the white screen. Thought I’d pass it on.

    So, only some of the functions on my dashboard would produce the white screen. Notably: plugins, users, comments, posts (all posts specifically). Was sporadic until earlier tonight. Then I got the white screen every time I clicked on one of those functions. Sonofagun.

    Followed the advice on one website and disabled all plugins by renaming the folder. Presto, the functions all worked. Went back and tried plugins one at a time. Found the culprit (adrotate). Went to the plugin website, looked around… no one else seemed to have the same problem as me. Hmmmm. Turned it back on and, yup, functions stopped working again. But that’s weird…

    Okay, what was I doing just before tonight’s white screen fiasco? Think, think. Ah yeah, I was going to edit some posts, so I clicked on ‘All posts’, it came up, then I clicked on ‘Screen Options’ and changed the display so it would display 300 posts at a time….

    Oh oh. Checked the adrotate plugin website again and it turns out it uses a wee bit of memory. I wonder if displaying 300 posts at a time uses a lot of memory… too much memory.

    Disabled all plugins again. Functions all work again. Went to Users/Posts/Comments and reset Screen Options to only display 50 of each on the screen at a time. Enabled all plugins again (including adrotate).

    Voila! No more white screen. Everything is working perfectly.

    Now I have no idea exactly why this worked, but it did. It just seems frustrating that some kind of error message doesn’t come up.

  • Kiko 27 October 2011, 6:02 am

    That solution work for me. For the wp.config and for theme also in function.php.

    There were few empty lines at the end in the functions.php, and was responsible for blank page after every action from the admin interface (ex. submit post/page).

  • Lexy 27 October 2011, 5:12 pm

    Thanks, you make my day 🙂

  • Cian Foley 3 November 2011, 1:11 am

    Hiya,

    Went through similar ordeal myself, tried manual install and replaced every filed I could and renamed every folder that mattered, in the end the only thing left was wp-config and there was a space above the <?php

    What's worse is the bottom one had gone missing… I am presuming this was a result of a malicious hacking attempt that aimed to stop me accessing the admin screen after they installed some sort of link injection hack…

    Thanks for your post. Check your wp-config files guys!

  • Tom 12 November 2011, 1:33 pm

    Thanks for this detailed expose. It does seem stupid that the wheels fall off from the extra carriage return at the end of functions.php. I found that one on my own because of some error messages.

    Getting the blank screen once again, I went out to the net and found your article.

    Coming here to read your post I thought I better double check functions – even when I already knew it, I had added some new functions recently.

    Sure enough, the wheels fell off all because I had accidentally added an extra space in the very first line at the beginning of the functions.php!

    Instead of

    <?

    I had

    <?

    DUH!

    How weak is F********* PHP!

    Also, if you ever get a failure from bad plugins, just rename plugins to something
    like plugins.off or plugins.hold – this is a lot easier than messing with your database,
    as WP will figure out after a couple of refresh pulls to the site that the plugins are not available, and essentially "off", and so then you just create a new plugins folder, and then drag n drop plugins from the "off folder into plugins and wait for the wheels to come off again – "stepwise refinement".

    Glad I'm not the only one who is amazed that after so many people have been lauding and applauding WP and who knows how many people have had their hands in development that the wheels fall off so easily.

  • Abox servers 16 November 2011, 11:03 am

    Try to desactivate the last installed plugins

  • Sue Anderson 16 November 2011, 5:17 pm

    Wow, I can’t thank you enough!! Fortunately, I found your solution before making myself too crazy looking for hours (or possible days for me :-)) elsewhere. The only thing I had done was to turn on debugging in the attempt to troubleshoot the Custom Contact Form plug-in. I did the edit in Dreamweaver CS4, only changing that one line of code. But apparently Dreamweaver decided to try to help me out by adding some white space at the end of the file. Great catch and I’m so grateful for your post! Thanks very much.

  • Howard 16 November 2011, 9:08 pm

    One more simple thing…
    Sometimes an old site that has been through many upgrades can revert to showing an older theme template not compitble. This, too, will cause the blank screen issue.

    It’s the simple things in life…

  • matt biggins 5 December 2011, 6:40 pm

    thank you! you saved me who knows how much time.

    good man….

  • sabrina 13 December 2011, 10:09 am

    I just clicked on the automatic update this morning and to my surprise, I could no longer access the dashboard after that. First time this thing happens and I’ve had Wordpress for years! 🙁 I’m going to guess that it’s a plugin incompatibility issue and take it from there.

  • Erik 2 January 2012, 10:28 pm

    Dude! Finally got it working. Hours of searching and I finally came across your post.

    Thanks a million and Happy New Year.

  • Simon 10 January 2012, 3:06 am

    Thanks Guru! It saved my life!!! Thanks

  • Lisa 16 January 2012, 1:33 am

    Please help, I have the issue of dreaded blank screen after I log into my admin site of my blog (it also has ‘w’ on top left of the screen) . However, I am not a techy and have no idea how to do any of the things you are giving guidance on…can you please give me the kindergarten version? Thank you

  • Jason M 16 January 2012, 4:56 pm

    I have an issue only (and rarely) when I try to update an existing post – it seems as if the database gets stuck/locked and it will just time out.

    I have searched all of the intarwebs for a possible solution or at least an explanation and I have not had any luck. If anyone has any ideas/thoughts/possible solutions please feel free to reply back here or contact me at my site. Thanks!

  • Milktea Addict 16 January 2012, 8:11 pm

    Thanks Colin, just updated to 3.3.1 and got this blank screen of death. I followed the disabled plugin fix in the database and solved everything for me.

  • judy 18 January 2012, 7:19 am

    almost 4 years after your initial post and the solution is still needed! after a day looking at a white screen, with no access to ANY page on the site, I did the active_plugin cleaning via the cPanel DB access and voila – my site is viewable once again.
    thank you!

  • Ashwin 20 January 2012, 2:46 pm

    Thanks a lot Tom.

    Also, if you ever get a failure from bad plugins, just rename plugins to something
    like plugins.off or plugins.hold – this is a lot easier than messing with your database,
    as WP will figure out after a couple of refresh pulls to the site that the plugins are not available, and essentially “off”, and so then you just create a new plugins folder, and then drag n drop plugins from the “off folder into plugins and wait for the wheels to come off again – “stepwise refinement”.

    This helped me to take care of the plugins without going into database.

  • Ash 7 February 2012, 3:45 pm

    WOW. Thanks… You saved my life.

    How ridiculous that a simple line-break can cost you 3 hours of head scratching. That one single line break can completely destroy your site.

  • Erich Stauffer 11 February 2012, 6:54 pm

    Thank you, thank you, thank you! I had extra spaces at the end of my functions.php file! Your tip about the wp-config.php and functions.php file tipped me off! Thanks!

  • Mook 16 February 2012, 1:31 pm

    Your, sir, are a legend! I never would’ve worked that out!

  • mua sam vui 20 February 2012, 5:17 pm

    i am currently in the dead blank screen ! Oh my God , i do not know what to do ! jusst google for 30m ! and find Ur blog . thanks !

  • Roofyroo 7 March 2012, 9:31 pm

    My site seems better and no blank white screen of death so far since making changes.

    The config.php file didn’t have a closing ?> and my theme’s functions.php file had an extra line.

    Will post back if it stays resolved.

    Thanks!

  • Janine Clark 8 March 2012, 8:29 am

    Hi All…….

    This BLANK SCREEN OF DEATH is driving me crazy. I am no IT fundi so going in search of a string in SQL is beyond my capabilities.

    My problem started after editing a page, clicked UPDATE, it updated the website. It may have nothing to do with the problem, but it is maybe worth a mention, I was updating during an electrical storm and my computer rebooted on its own during the updating process. Could a power surge have caused something in the background to “hang”. I have rebooted my computer several times and emptied all temporary internet files, caches, cookies etc but to no avail.

    I can log in from any other computer and all is good, but from my computer where the problem originated no luck. BLANK SCREEN OF DEATH.

    Please can you assist?

    Thanks

  • Roofyroo 8 March 2012, 3:19 pm

    Replying again to share that the above did NOT fix my problem. It may have helped in fixing it but the issue was still arising.

    I did some more searching and found another potential fix by increasing the memory. In terms of what I was seeing happen this seemed like a very reasonable solution and since then I have had no issue. I could see my page opening with the correct URL but it was obviously timing out. So if the above doesn’t work then try this also.

    Not sure where to add the code but I added it after this line in the config.php file.

    define(‘NONCE_SALT’, ‘*****;

    —code below—
    /** set WP memory limit for blank screen of death test */
    define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
    —code above—

    Hope that helps some people!

  • Shay Moore 13 March 2012, 3:11 am

    I just need you to know that you’re a god. Nothing short of a GOD.

    I was beating myself up, couldn’t figure out HOW I could have possibly ruined my WP install when I had been so very careful with every little change I had made. I was going over and over the details, and couldn’t see where I had gone wrong.

    You are a god.

  • Al Priest 15 March 2012, 12:21 pm

    I had the WSOD on my Wordpress site, and for me WP_CACHE was the issue. In wp_config.php I changed:

    define(‘WP_CACHE’, true);

    to

    define(‘WP_CACHE’, false);

    And the site re-appeared. I suspect WP_CACHE has cached a bad copy of the site, so deleting its’ cache files might have done the trick too.

  • Tom Jordan 20 March 2012, 7:33 pm

    This sorted our site ( http://www.interplayleeds.co.uk/ ) right out! So grateful. Thankyou.

  • Rod 24 March 2012, 8:20 am

    Wow! One of the best posts on WP I have ever seen. Completely solved the same issue for me – in functions.php – lots of carriage returns after the closing ?> Thank you!

  • Brian 26 March 2012, 7:31 pm

    THANK YOU! Had the WPBSOD. Using your tip, I found 2 blanks lines at the end of my custom functions file. Deleted them and site was back up and running!! Woot!!

  • Ash 31 March 2012, 4:01 am

    When I first started reading this I was laughing to myself say “yeah right”. But I’m total shocked that its 2012 and this bloody did the trick!

    Mate your good!

    Thanks.

  • WordPress Lover-Hater-Lover 1 April 2012, 10:30 pm

    I too just recovered from the dreaded white screen of death and wanted to share my solution with you all in case someone out there can save a few hairs on their head.

    My solution was different than many of the others above since my admin page died immediately after downloading an incompatible plug in. I knew this was the culprit because I did not get a successful plugin installation message and got a white screen right then and there. Of course, I tried logging into the admin page to fix it and learned that I was locked out. That’s how I came to find this page seeking help.

    Anyways, in my case, all I needed to do was …simply FTP’d into the site…went into the plugins folder…found the evil plugin and deleted it.

    That’s it. All is now good.

    After spending all day (literally!) screwing with the WP_Options table within PHPMyAdmin and wasting time calling Web.Com twice (they suck SOOOO bad!)…that’s all that was needed.

    I hope this helps someone.

  • rizve ahmed 5 April 2012, 8:19 pm

    thank you very much.recently i got problem in my wordpress.i fixed this.

  • widi dwi 13 April 2012, 7:49 pm

    I got this problem to … yes, i was panic. but thank you, after read your problem solving it`s make me calm and try remember what was i do before got this death screen. In my case, the main suspect is the new theme that i was create and yes it`s in functions.php
    it`s has a blank space, not in bottom of file … but in the middle

    example from my code …
    ordinary code…. } } ?> <?php function …. that call other database
    edit to
    ordinary code…. } } function …. that call other database

    And the result … the death screen problem fix. everything got normal again.
    look like the w3cache plugin is recognize this trouble to, but i thought it`s just the plugin failed to make cache from my new theme.

  • DEJOCAR 13 May 2012, 11:48 pm

    THANK YOU KIND MAN YOU SAVED ME FROM A FUCKING DISASTER!!!!!! IT WAS THE EMPTY LINE IN MY CASE – SOOO FUCKED UP 🙁

  • Siobhan 20 May 2012, 9:03 pm

    Thank you so much! Lifesaver.

  • Drew 12 June 2012, 11:02 pm

    DESPARATE FOR HELP
    I have zero experience in web development. I was given access to a wordpress admin page to add new posts. I quickly managed to get the blank screen. Here’s what happened:
    I was attampting to add a post to my employer’s website. The content wouldn’t show on the main page so I tried doing an update to the newest version of wordpress. It wasn’t responsive, then I noticed the option to install/upgrade plugins. So I did that, and then suddenly had a blank white page on both the admin page and the actual site. After doing some research I’m assuming the plugins are the problem.
    My issue is I do not know how to uninstall/remove them. I tried using FileZilla to access the site but it can never make a connection.
    To make things worse my employer had a falling out with the web developer so I want to try and fix this discreetly on my own.
    Advice?

  • RAMAN 13 June 2012, 8:36 am

    Thankzz alot…
    My problem is solved….

  • Colin McNulty 13 June 2012, 9:58 am

    Thanks for all the thanks, I’m glad it helped.

    Drew, if you don’t know what you’re doing you could seriously mess up your employer’s website by fiddling around, I suggest you get your employer to pay for someone to help you out.

  • Jennifer Jabbour 30 June 2012, 4:04 pm

    YOU JUST SAVED ME HOURS OF FRUSTRATION!!!! And you just happened to mention that it could happen in the functions file and sure enough that was the file I edited yesterday! As soon as I removed the spaces, everything is back to normal! Thanks so much!!!!

  • askobasi 5 July 2012, 10:39 am

    I can’t login to my dashboard, anyone knows alternative to login to wordpress dashboard. i formally had blanc problem if i use http://www.wannapublish.com/wp-admin it appear blanc but if its http://www.wannapublish.com/wp-login.php it does not.

  • maurice 8 July 2012, 11:50 pm

    I had this problem intermittently and tried lots of alternatives.

    My issues went away when I changed the PHP version from 5.2 to 5.3 used by my hosting service (Hostmonster.com), via cpanel.

    Everything just started working faster as well.

    Good Luck

  • Ray Lance 14 July 2012, 2:03 pm

    This solution seems to be obviated in wp3.2.1, as the ?> line at end of wp-config.php has been removed.

    My answer was to deactivate the W3 Total Cache plugin, leaving CloudFlare still frontending.

  • Ray Lance 14 July 2012, 2:10 pm

    Actually, PHP removed the close tag requirement at end-of-file over two years ago!

  • Giuseppe Calamita 9 August 2012, 7:50 am

    Hello, one common trait that links all of the wordpress users is that they simply do not realize it is not a CMS; it is a blog updated to do some things as a CMS do.
    I mena I’m using wordpress to build some web sites; I’m a Joomla! developer. Only now I realized the real difference between them is that wordpress start to begin unstable after having installed several plugins; Joomla! being a real CMS is designed to let you build web sites by adding the more different extensions (made by several developers) without compatibility issues.

  • George Lerner 21 September 2012, 10:49 pm

    1) Valid PHP has both the open tag ( ). Even though it “isn’t required” at the end of a file, leave it in.

    2) It isn’t removing the blank line (or closing PHP tag, or ___) that does the trick. It is the Editing that does the trick. Most programmer editors (or plain text editors) will fix weird line ending characters. PHP has a few commands that must start at the beginning of a line. PHP has comments that continue Until The End of Line (use // to start the comment).

    If there is an improper line-ending for a “//-comment” the following line’s code will be “eaten”, very likely leading to a syntax error (if not, then a logic error that you’ll never see). Syntax errors you can see with code like below.

    Most editors will fix line breaks (on a Windows machine, it will convert all line breaks to Windows format), and FTP programs will, in ASCII Mode, convert to the destination computer’s format.

    TIP: Don’t transfer .php files from an Apache server (Unix line endings, LF) to a Windows computer (Windows line endings, CRLF) in Binary mode. Transfer .php files Always In ASCII (Text) mode, so the line endings are correct.

    NotePad++ (and no doubt other programmer editors) will let you see line ending characters (View menu, Show Symbol, Show End of Line. NotePad++ will allow you to change line endings: Edit menu, EOL Conversion. That’s how I found one of those line-ending problems…

    Put this in wp_config.php (or any other PHP file you might be having problems in):


    // set this to your home and work IP address, 127.0.0.1 if you're using XAMPP
    $myipaddress = array("123.45.67.89","23.45.67.890", "127.0.0.1");

    $docroot = getenv("DOCUMENT_ROOT");
    $logfile = "$docroot/error_log";
    ini_set("error_log" , $logfile);
    ini_set("log_errors" , "1");

    $ip = getenv("REMOTE_ADDR");
    if (array_search($ip, $myipaddress) !== FALSE) {
    ini_set("display_errors","2");
    ini_set("display_startup_errors","On");
    ini_set("ignore_repeated_errors","Off");
    ini_set("html_errors","on");
    error_reporting(E_ALL | E_NOTICE | E_STRICT);
    } else {
    ini_set("display_errors","0");
    error_reporting(0);
    }

  • Lloiid 8 October 2012, 1:58 am

    Thanks a million man this just happened to me and first search found your blog. Saved me hours.

  • TB 25 October 2012, 3:39 am

    I realize this post is ages old now, but just wanted to say thanks; it really saved my ass. A plugin that worked on my current live site was causing issues when moving it to local for development and then migrating to new host, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out.

    Erased the active_plugins field and everything resolved itself, then just re-enabled the plug-in from WP dashboard and all is running smoothly! Thanks!

  • Shashank 10 November 2012, 2:06 am

    Please Help Me.
    I have Migrated my website FROM one cpanel host to another Cpanel Hosting provider
    I can access the Home Page and Some Posts/articles

    But When I used to Login in My admin Area.
    Its showing me the White Screen.
    and Sometimes when I used to browse my Articles.. then too the White Screen Is Coming..

    Do Help Me !!!!

  • D Cass 2 December 2012, 8:58 pm

    THANK YOU!!!!!!

  • David C. 6 December 2012, 10:49 pm

    Holy Crap. I had two blank lines at the end of wp-config.php. I took over this project and couldn’t figure this out. Never seen this in many many WP installs.

    Thanks Colin!

  • DarrenW 10 January 2013, 9:55 pm

    lol!!! I unfortunately have wasted hours and hours trying to figure this out, and sure enough I had one blank line at the end of the wp-config file ..removed it and viola it’s working again. No more BS blank pages…dig your article though, lots of sarcasm as I’m sure you were pissed off on how easy this was to fix..as I am now.

    But TY Colin for turning my crappy week around….

  • elias 17 January 2013, 7:32 pm

    after upgrading my wordpress to 3.5 via ftp im getting a blank page on all site front and backend
    any help please

  • Bob 19 January 2013, 6:30 pm

    Wow. Been using WP for a while and just encountered this one. For me it happened at when I tried to log in to the admin area. Nothing but a white screen after typing in my username and password and clicking log in. This was local, developing with MAMP.

    I looked in my MAMP folder and found the PHP error log. It was showing an error on line 66 of my functions.php file.

    OK, I thought, I’ve done something wrong in there. I went to functions.php — which wasn’t too long — and realized there was no line 66. It ended at line 63 or something.

    Lo and behold, there were a couple of extra returns at the bottom after the closing ?> tag.

    I took them out. Suddenly, I could log in normally. So weird. The thing is, I feel like those returns were possibly there all along. Although I did do some recent editing in functions.php right before this problem began, so maybe I did accidentally add them them. Can’t say for sure.

    But, yeah, for that to “bring WordPress to its knees” as you put it … so very weird.

  • IIain 31 January 2013, 1:32 pm

    I don’t believe that 6 years afterwards its still possible to happen in WP 3.5. I had the same symptoms that you described and had hacked about the functions.php file a bit during the build. Yes extra carriage returns were there, take them away and perfect service resumes.

    Thank goodness i found this early in the process of trying to find out why.

  • Ray 6 March 2013, 1:02 pm

    Had to post this here for folks who might be having the same trouble I was. I spent 10+ hours trying to get to the bottom of this so here goes:

    For people who are using Thesis 1.8.x who are experiencing WSOD after updating posts or logging in. If you are using custom hooks like ‘thesis_hook_before_post’ in your custom_functions.php file it will fire them on the backend too (At least mine did). This will cause an “Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by…” and mess up the redirect. Thing is, you won’t see it because it’s only a warning. Thus, the whitescreen.

    How to fix it? I finally found a good answer here: http://drop9creative.com/custom-wordpressdesigning-thesis/

    Drop9, wish I could post a thank you on your blog but comments are disabled. Anyway, you rock!

    Colin, thanks for this post. I read just about every comment looking for a solution. Didn’t solve my particular problem but I’m sure it’s helped others. I just wanted to add yet one more solution to the list in the hope this can help someone who was as stumped as I was.

  • Gary 7 March 2013, 2:04 am

    You are a GOD! Thanks so much for figuring this out.

  • Hakim 8 March 2013, 1:24 am

    If you notice, the new wp-config in wp 3.5.1 doesn’t have ?> in the end of file. After upgrade your wp installation, be sure to check the new wp-config –> carriage return & ?> .

    http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.5.1/wp-config-sample.php

  • Wordpress Solution 22 March 2013, 9:53 pm

    Thanks but i think you need to update the article. Now wp 3.5.1 is running

  • Oliver Nielsen 28 May 2013, 7:17 pm

    Hi Colin McNulty
    You saved my day.
    Have spent two days on this topic.
    Now my website is up again.
    Many many thanks, for sharing your knowledge

  • ank 29 June 2013, 7:40 pm

    THANK YOU SOOOOOOOO MUCH FOR THIS POST ! i had the exact same problem but mine was linked to the shortcodes.php file… I’ve been seriously waiting for hours for my site to magically pop up again but it didn’t of course, uploaded 1 simple file and yes i’m back up!

    great !

  • Joe Shmidt 8 August 2013, 9:52 pm

    Running on Genesis with a custom header.php , you must have an index.php file in the theme dir that says some other than “Silence is Golden” – genesis();

    Or the permalinks will not work correctly
    J

  • Jennifer 19 August 2013, 3:37 pm

    You’re a genius! Most of the time, as a developer, I go for the hardest issues first. I guess that is one of our flaws. My project manager came to me today saying after we did a new install, he couldn’t access any of the internal pages other than the dashboard for the wordpress install. He said he got a blank screen. What? So, I knew it was a php issue or DB issue right off the bat. I almost went the “change things here and there” route for the DB. BUT~ I stumbled upon this post first. LO AND BEHOLD! It worked. AMAZING. Thank you so much 🙂

  • Jerad 18 November 2013, 3:59 pm

    I ran into this issue on a client’s site. I was upgrading from an archaic version of WordPress and, once the upgrade was complete, everything went white. Somehow, the very first thing I tried ended up working:

    UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ” WHERE option_name = ‘active_plugins’

    Thanks for your article! I’m sure it saved me hours.

  • Eric 1 March 2014, 2:51 pm

    Personally I haven’t had this problem, yet, I have the problem that I have to reset my permalinks all the time because of endless redirects. Drives me crazy. Every time I publish a new post on my blog I have to set the permalinks back to standard and then back to post name. Do you know if this is host related or plugin related?

  • sonesh 17 May 2014, 2:14 pm

    i have faced the white screen problem after restoring my site i got my site live again

  • Warren 5 July 2014, 7:29 pm

    Thanks for the solution… even my hosting unable to solve it.

  • Samantha 8 July 2014, 7:30 pm

    Hi Colin!

    THANK YOU SO MUCH! Really. I was messing around with my theme files about an hour ago and my whole website went completely white. I almost started to cry because I didn’t think there would be anything I could do to fix it. You saved me hours, phones calls, tears, and frustration. THANK YOU! I can’t say it loud enough!

    What I had to do was go into my hosting cPanel >> file manager >> wp-content >> themes >> theme folder >> functions.php. I right clicked it, went into the editor, and deleted the last thing I had saved. A little confusing, but you saved my life from a white screen of death.

    You are a legend.

  • George Lerner 3 October 2014, 7:54 am

    Please edit the main article. You have hundreds of people searching for “blank lines” to remove, when blank lines in PHP are irrelevant. The problem is actually improper line ending characters. When you edit the file, e.g. typing space backspace, your text editor fixes the line ending characters.

    Please edit the main article, giving the code I gave above, or that others gave, for turning on logging error messages, so your visitors can Know what error is causing their problem, and in which file the error is in. There are too many files in WordPress to guess where the problem is!

    Please be a good Editor, and add your commentary to comments that are incorrect or misunderstand something. It’s not “WordPress is buggy” or unstable or hard to get working, it’s people not knowing how to find the problem. It’s not “how come PHP is so unstable a blank line causes a white screen”, but files with wrong line endings (and programmers using the form of PHP comments that relies on end of line).

    http://lcblog.lernerconsult.com/2012-wordpress-white-screen-of-death/

  • Goshuttle 24 November 2014, 10:54 am

    Easy way is just ignore the blank page error and login by using following setp

    normally we login to wordpress admin through websiteurl/wp-admin

    now try login to wordpress admin through websiteurl/wp-login.php

    you will find your login screen.

    if you want more help mail me at onlineadspostingservices@gmail.com

    regards

    vks

  • Mo 1 June 2015, 2:45 pm

    wp-config-sample.php missing WHAT? WHAT?
    THIS??
    !!! ?> !!!
    WHAT?
    (pardon moi, first timer, cried all morning)
    Thank you for sharing this!

  • Celia 9 June 2015, 1:31 am

    I just had to write to say a very BIG THANK YOU! My WordPress site just crashed and I got the dreaded white blank screen…I freaking panicked and for the past half hour was scouring online for help. Your site and article was probably the 10th one I read in desperation…and it helped!!! My site is nowback up and in less than hours I thought ot would take me to figure things out…oh my gosh, thank you so so much!!!

  • Amir 18 December 2015, 10:06 pm

    Hello,
    And THANK YOU, THANK YOU and THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
    Have a great time, every where you are.

  • Stephanie 23 February 2016, 2:57 pm

    THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!! The space was at the bottom of my functions.php file!

  • Rajendra 29 April 2016, 4:40 am

    I had made no changes all of suddenly my blog is shoing blank and not able to log into dash board also

  • Vandana 18 May 2016, 6:43 am

    Thanks, suggestion to remove the blank space from default thmes’s functions.php file worked.

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