Get Rid of the White Screen of Death – Permanently!

You may have encountered the ‘White Screen of Death’ when visiting your website. This is a documented WordPress error, and can arise from a number of issues.

Low PHP memory limit set by website host

Shared hosting providers often do this. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough memory for your plug-ins to run, or scripts to be executed, or both, ultimately resulting in the White Screen of Death.

There is a simple fix for this:
Simply log in to your FTP server, find the public_html folder, and open the wp-config.php file in a text editor. Add the line

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘64M’);

to the PHP code (you should find a section starting with some lines later – anywhere between these two lines will do), save the file and close it.

Plug-ins

A faulty plug-in could be causing the White Screen of Death. In the public_html folder, look for a sub-folder named wp-content. Inside this, there should be a folder named plugins. All you have to do is rename it to something else, like ‘Betsy’ – or any other name you like. Then see if your site is working, minus the plug-ins. If it is, you now know for sure that the White Screen of Death is caused by an incompatible plug-in.

What is the solution?

Inside the plugins (or Betsy as it is now) folder, you will find a folder for each of of your plug-ins. Rename Betsy back to plugins, but try the renaming process for each plug-in’s folder (and then reloading the site) until you find out which one is causing the White Screen of Death. You find the plug-in responsible when you have renamed that plug-in’s folder and the White Screen of Death doesn’t occur.

After you have zeroed in on the culprit, see if you can find an alternative plug-in for your website. If not, try updating it to its latest version. If none of the plug-ins are causing the White Screen of Death, then it might be your WordPress theme.

WordPress theme

In the public_html folder, there should be a folder named themes. Rename it, and the site should revert back to its default theme. If the White Screen of Death no longer appears, you know your theme was causing it. Just like we did with the plug-ins, you can rename it back to themes, but before doing so, you can rename the active theme’s folder name.

This changes your theme, but better that than a White Screen of Death. You can then try downloading a new WordPress them for your site.

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