Jul
17
WordPress White Screen of Death
Filed Under WordPress SEO
We have all heard of the Windows “blue screen of death”, but when it comes to webmasters and marketers the most feared problem is the WordPress White Screen of Death. This happens usually after you upgrade a plugin or make a change within the WordPress design manager and all of a sudden your screen goes white! Another symptom is if FireFox asks you to either open the php file or save it to disk rather than just let you work on the damn file!
Why Does WordPress Have White Screens Or Ask You To Open Or Save a PHP File
This isn’t a WordPress problem, but really a MySQL - PHP function or rather failure. When a PHP page is loading or trying to load and either an error occurs or a script can’t load, it just dies rather than blowing out bad code. Within the backend of WordPress this causes the WordPress White Screen of Death.
Even though your website will still be displaying content to visitors, you have no access to the backend which is about as bad as it gets next to your site being down. Most of my themes rely on a plugin called Limit Posts and if that isn’t activated, my sites look down right wrong and incomplete. So what do you do when this happens?
Well the first thing is to ascertain where the problem is. If you just installed a plugin and all of a sudden your system is no longer working then it is pretty easy to figure out that the problem is the plugin you just installed! When you are upgrading either your entire WordPress system or a single plugin, the game plan is the same. Always activate our plugins ONE AT A TIME. If you are using the automatic plugin updater, deactivate the plugin prior to updating it.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to follow those rules. Again:
- Deactivate the plugin that you are upgrading first - if you use the WordPress auto-upgrader, deactivate the plugin before updating.
- Activate plugins one at a time - after you activate a plugin after a WordPress upgrade, go to settings or mange and hit a couple of links to make sure that your system hasn’t crashed. The problem is if you log out and log back in after a plugin upgrade, you might get the WordPress white screen of death and not be able to see your backend. If that happens, you will have to remove the plugin from your plugin directory. Another reason to activate your plugins one at a time is so you know which plugin is causing the problem. You can delete it from your plugin directory then you can log back in and see your backend.
I know I am repeating myself here, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to follow those rules. I manage over 17 systems for myself and my clients and have a lot of experience with screwing up, so trust me when I tell you these things, I have messed up every aspect of WordPress at one time or another! Fortunately I am able to learn from my mistakes and pass that on to all of you.
WordPress Problems That Involve Widgets Or Theme Editor Design Changes
Other than plugins, the next most common issues involve failures with WordPress after you change a file within the Theme Editor, or you have added or changed a widget within the sidebar. If you change something and the screen goes white or you try to access a file and it offers to save it to disk or open it with your default program, you have a php issue.
The question is which PHP function has failed? There are a few methods to check errors and most of them are technical. If you are on a shared hosting like GoDaddy you have to look in the log with c-panel or on other hosting solutions that use plesk you have to view the apache logs. If you have access to the server at a root level they are by default in the /var/logs/. If you set up sites within your home folder, then they might be anywhere. The best thing is to contact tech support at your hosting company and ask where the apache logs are for your site.
When you get the latest log after an error it will look like a bunch of code like this:
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function
force_mod… in /home/mstankard/web/getfoundnow_com/wp-settings.php on
line 160 referer: http://www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/wp-admin/comment.php?action=approve; etc.
Yours will look a lot different since I had to change a couple of things for security, but this shows the problem was in a comment approval that went bad. I was able to remove the recent comments plugin and everything worked fine. The trick is to identify where the issue is and act upon it.
Another problem I had was with a video display plugin which I was able to troubleshoot with FireFox by viewing source of the error page:
I loaded up the following URL after logging in to my blog’s management console:
http://www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=flv-embed.php
There was a section in the page where the player was supposed to be loaded, but it was not appearing. I turned on the error console feature in Firefox to view the Javascript errors and found the following:
SWFObject is not defined
http://www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=flv-embed.php
I used the “View Source” function in Firefox to view the source of the plugin management page and found the link to the swfobject.js file. It was pointing to the following URL:
http://www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/wp-content/plugins/flv-embed/swfobject.js
This showed it was looking for code in a different place than before since I removed a plugin that white-screened me, but was able to recreate the directory and copy the file in and it worked.
I am going to continue to update this post
If you are having WordPress 2.6 Upgrade Login Problems go there and read that post.
If you like killer WordPress themes you could go to that link as well!
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[...] WordPress White Screen of DeathWe have all heard of the Windows “blue screen of death”, but when it comes to webmasters and marketers the most feared problem is the WordPress White Screen of Death. This happens usually after you upgrade a plugin or make a change … [...]
[...] good way to upgrade! I had heard some pretty bad stories about upgrading to 2.6 such as this one by Getfoundnow and the forum is full of problems everyone seems to be experiencing. I got to tell you, this is [...]
[...] to Get Found Now for writing about the issue. Their article lead me to my own conclusion that [...]
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