Fixing the WordPress "White Screen of Death"

You open your website and see nothing. No logo, no error message—just a blank white screen—and often the dashboard isn’t working either. To fix the WordPress “white screen of death,” first rule out the cache, then disable plugins and the theme via the file manager or SFTP, increase the PHP memory limit, and use debug mode to identify the actual error message. Your site isn’t gone—your files and database are still on the server. Below, I’ll walk you through the causes, from most likely to rarest.

What the white screen means

A white screen in WordPress almost always means that a PHP error has stopped the page from loading halfway through, while error messages on a live site are hidden. In that case, there is literally nothing to display. Since WordPress 5.2, instead of the blank screen, you’ll often see the message A critical error has occurred on this site. That's the same problem, just with a friendlier face, and the approach is described in A critical error has occurred. Please resolve it.. In that case, WordPress also sends an email to the administrator's address with a link to recovery mode, which allows you to log in despite the error. That email is the first thing I look for.

The second thing I check is where the screen is white. Is only the front white, and does it work? /wp-admin If that’s not the case, the error is almost certainly in your theme or in a plugin that runs only on the front end. If everything is white, I’ll check the plugins first. Also, make sure you’re not looking at an old version. Open the site in an incognito window or on your phone using mobile data. If you can see it there, then nothing is broken and you just need to clear the cache. The white screen is one of the errors listed in the overview Troubleshooting WordPress Errors, where you'll also find related reports.

Disabling Plugins and Themes Without the Dashboard

The most common cause of a white screen is a plugin—often immediately after an update or installation—and you can disable it even without the dashboard by renaming the plugin folder. If you can still log in, deactivate all plugins via Plugins > Installed plugins and put them back one by one. If you can't log in, work through the files.

1. Open the File Manager in your hosting control panel or connect via SFTP.
2. Go to the folder wp-content and rename plugins to plugins_off. WordPress then disables all plugins at once.
3. Reload your site. If the screen is gone, it was caused by a plugin.
4. Restore the folder to its original name, and then rename the plugins inside it one by one until the white screen reappears. The last one you renamed is the culprit.
5. If it remains white, rename it to wp-content/themes the folder for your active theme. WordPress will fall back to a default theme if one is installed.

People often forget that last condition. If you’ve deleted all the default themes, such as Twenty Twenty-Five, WordPress has nothing to fall back on and the screen will remain blank. That’s why I always leave one default theme in place. If you’re working with SSH, it’s faster to use WP-CLI. With deactivate all WordPress plugins Turn off all plugins and use Activate the TwentyTwentyFive WordPress theme Change the theme. If the error is caused by the theme, it's usually in the custom code within functions.php, such as a missing semicolon after a quick edit. To learn how to make such changes more safely, read Editing WordPress Code.

Memory Limit and PHP Version

If PHP runs out of the memory it’s allowed to use per request, the page will stop loading halfway through and the screen will remain blank. This happens with resource-intensive plugins, large imports, or a page builder with many elements on a single page. Within WordPress, you can increase this limit with the line define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); in wp-config.php, above the line that says you need to stop editing. What many online guides fail to mention is that this setting can never exceed the limit allowed by the server. WordPress asks for more, but PHP makes the final call.

You should therefore adjust the server limit as well. On our shared hosting, you can do this yourself in cPanel > Select PHP Version > Options, at memory_limit. On that same screen, you can switch PHP versions, and that’s the other common cause. An old plugin that doesn’t work with PHP 8, or a new plugin that requires a recent version, will result in exactly this blank screen. If you switched versions shortly before this happened, temporarily revert to the previous version and figure out which component isn’t compatible. In Update PHP Version You'll learn how to test that properly. My advice, though, is not to keep increasing the memory indefinitely. If a site keeps needing more and more, there's usually a plugin that's using too many resources.

Finding the Actual Error Message

If the plugins, theme, and memory settings don't help, look up the error message in the error log, because it specifies exactly which file and which line are causing the error. On our servers, PHP writes errors to a file error_log in the folder where the error occurs. If there's nothing useful there, set the debug mode on. That's when the errors start wp-content/debug.log, without your visitors seeing them.

Then read the path in the message. Does it say wp-content/plugins/plugin-name/ in, then you'll know who's to blame. Does it say wp-includes or wp-admin, then a core update probably didn't go through properly. In that case, download the same version of WordPress and upload the folders wp-admin and wp-includes again. You wp-content and wp-config.php Leave it alone, because that's where your own files and settings are stored. If you just want to get back to a working site as quickly as possible, you can do that by restoring a backup from before the problem occurred. You can find instructions on how to do that in Restore a backup. If the screen appeared immediately after an update, also check Site Down After an Update.

At Surver, we make sure you don’t have to do this kind of searching blindly. With our shared hosting plans, you have access to File Manager, SSH, and WP-CLI, and you can restore a backup using JetBackup 5 in cPanel. Before restoring, be sure to first create a backup of the current state, as it won’t be saved automatically. Using these tools, you can resolve the issue on our Managed WordPress Hosting yourself. If you'd rather have us check every minute to see if your site is accessible and handle the updates for you, then WordPress maintenance better.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I see a blank screen, does that mean I've lost my content?

No. Your pages, posts, and images are still in the database and in wp-content, but the page isn't loading properly. Once the error is fixed, everything will be back to normal.

Why is my dashboard the only one that's white?

In that case, the problem is usually caused by a plugin that only loads in the admin panel, such as an SEO or page builder plugin. Disable the plugins by renaming their folders, then re-enable them one by one.

Can a white screen be caused by a hack?

That can happen, for example, if malicious code corrupts a file. If you see unfamiliar files or administrators, treat it as a hack rather than a simple error. On Surver shared hosting, Imunify scans for malware every time a file is modified, so suspicious files are locked immediately.