There may not be a single user who has not experienced the White screen of death in word press at least once. White screen of death in word press is an exasperating problem as it locks you out of your Word Press admin panel. As in most cases, there is no error which leaves one bewildered with the real issue.
If you are staring at your screen and wondering what happened, then you are not alone. Nearly every user of word press has experienced the same white screen of death. It is one of the basic issues, but it is straightforward to fix!!
We’re about to investigate several causes of the white screen of death ranging from PHP to server issues and how you can recover your website now.
The most exasperating part of the white screen of death is that it sometimes only effects part of the site whereas rest of the site seems working smoothly.
What is the white screen of death?
The very first thing that we must answer: what is the white screen of death, it is an error that appears when word press is not working properly? Basically, it sometimes displays a white screen instead of showing you content when someone visits your website. You can see one great article about this on 000webhost.com too and get a better idea.
Here you can understand the problem with a very simple example, consider word press as your bicycle where your code is your chain which helps driving the wheel, now the white screen of death is the very scenario when chain slips out of its gear ring. This situation leads to the scenario where we cannot drive our cycle (website cannot display content) until you put back chain to its gear ring (white screen death error is removed).
Reason for the happening of the White screen of death
Majority of the time when you see this problem is due to exhausted memory limit. Another reason which can lead to such error is due to malfunctioning of an installed plugin. One may even face such error due to a poorly coded theme that one might be using. There may also be issues with the server hosting your website since numbers of issues that can cause the problem are so varied, one has to troubleshoot extensively.
Do your other sites are also facing similar issue?
One of the important things has to make sure is the white screen of death is happening across along a single domain or is acting across the whole board. If one face issues with all the sites there may be the possibility of some issues with web hosting provider is facing some problem. However, if the issue is with your site then there may be chances of faulty plugin or the theme you are using is faulty.
Countermeasures by increasing the memory limit
This is one of the issues faced when memory has been exhausted completely. One can easily turn on WP_DEBUG if you are an advanced user and comfortably using an FTP client then the problem can be solved easily. The active mode, WP_DEBUG helps to determine to determine the reasons for improper site working by displaying error messages as a guide for troubleshooting the problem.
Disable all plug-in
If the scenario arises when even with high memory such as 512M cannot seek out the problem. As in most of the cases, it is observed that the issue is with a specific plugin or a theme which can be easily countered by disabling all plugin.
The error with name white screen of death where death is only an hyperbole and no one dies because of the white screen, but there may be some plugin which may be killed(deactivate) to initiate the website again.
Plug in may affect word press in many ways as it can be due to activating a plugin word press, providing changes to the active plugin or even when you were providing modifications to the active plug in the backend mode. These all issues can be resolved by navigating to the plugin page and deactivating the plugin you were modifying
There are instances when one cannot delete the offending plugin, then one can use an FTP client to access to your word press files through which one can delete or deactivate and even modify the necessary plugin.
Replacing a theme with a default theme or faulty code
If the troubleshooting does not fix the issue then current theme can be replaced by the default theme which is twenty ten theme. Backing up your theme folder can be the best way in this case. The process of deleting theme can be continued as word press will automatically fall back to default theme. If the extra spaces do exist at the bottom then they must be tried to eliminate. Another reason for this issue can be due to poorly coded functions in their theme functions of .php files.
In case if you were not working on any theme when the white screen of death reared its head to your website, but you were modifying your theme file through word press theme editor one might even see the message like
This shows that there is the flaw in the code. Word press cannot work if your code is broken, so one has to revisit the file he was working on. But there may be a scene where you might be even not able to access to your word press theme editor, and the best way to cater this problem is uploading a new version of this file to your word press through your FTP client.
Other fixes
If other functions are insufficient to solve the problem then one may try other sources to find the root cause of the problem. Sometimes you may have access to the backhand of the site but front-end of the site is still having the white screen of death on the very long post page, then one must also try clearing cache. The other way that can be used to solve the problem is by increasing the recursion and backtrack limit.