The WordPress “White Screen of Death” is an error that a lot of website owners, designers, and developers dread. It’s a lot like an Error 500, where the bug is tough to isolate. It could manifest as just a blank page, an error message stating, “This page isn’t working,” “There has been a critical error on your website,” or any similar variation. It could show up in your website’s frontend, or even on your WP-Admin/WP-Login Page. Either way, your site will be inaccessible due to the WordPress White Screen of Death.
There are a lot of solutions to choose from, though, and you could start with deactivating two main components: Your theme, or all the plugins you use.
- How to Debug Your WordPress Theme
- How to Debug Your Plugins
We will discuss more solutions to the WordPress White Screen of Death, but for the purpose of this article, we will focus our discussion on why it happens and how to prevent it.
Main Reasons Why It Happens
While the WordPress White Screen of Death presents as something similar to Error 500 for websites in general, the root of the error always starts with PHP incompatibilities:
- The PHP version your WordPress installation needs is different from the PHP version set for your website on the cPanel.
- Your WordPress installation needs an update to the current version.
- Your WordPress plugins need to be updated to their current versions.
As you start from this point in figuring out the error, you might encounter being limited in fixing things because you can’t log in to your WordPress. Fear not, because you can access your plugin and theme files from the cPanel File Manager.
Please refer to these guides on how to do that:
- How to Debug Your WordPress Theme
- How to Debug Your Plugins
Prevention Is Better Than Cure, Always
Indeed, you would want to arrest the problem before it even starts. Here in CLDY, we always believe that prevention is better than cure, so we suggest taking these steps in making sure that you won’t ever have to encounter the WordPress White Screen of Death:
- Always keep your WordPress installation up to date.
- Always match your WordPress installation requirements to your PHP version on your cPanel.
- Please refer to this guide to learn how to do that: How to Modify the PHP Version for Your Domain via cPanel?
- Always keep all your plugins up to date.
- Keep a regular schedule of updating your WordPress installation, making sure the PHP version is matched to your WordPress requirements, as well as updating your themes and plugins. This mitigates the possibility of incompatibilities due to outdated components.
- You might want to keep a Security plugin installed, that way you get to have a quick overview of what components might need urgent updating.
A website owner does not need to fear the WordPress White Screen of Death issue. With proper maintenance, errors can be prevented. And with proper debugging, it is possible to find out which component has caused the error, and deal with it immediately.
For further assistance, however, you may also reach out to [email protected], and we will be happy to help!
