Error guide / WordPress White Screen of Death
WordPress White Screen of Death (WSOD)
The White Screen of Death is a blank white page with no error message where your WordPress site or admin should be. Most of the time it hides a PHP fatal error and an HTTP 500 response that WordPress does not display, because error output is turned off. The server does answer, but PHP stopped running before it could build the page.
Check your site
What causes it
The cause is almost always on the site's side, not the visitor's. Typical culprits are a plugin or theme conflict after an update, an exhausted PHP memory limit, or a corrupted or half-written file (for example after editing functions.php by hand or a broken update). Less often the server itself is to blame, when the PHP version changed or an extension is missing.
How to fix it
- First confirm it is a hidden 500: use the availability check below to see the response code. A 500 instead of a 200 means a PHP fatal error, not a network or uptime problem.
- Turn on the error log: in wp-config.php set define('WP_DEBUG', true); and define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);. The exact file and line will be written to wp-content/debug.log. Switch it back to false once you are done.
- Disable all plugins at once: in cPanel File Manager rename wp-content/plugins to plugins_off. If the site comes back, rename it back and re-enable plugins one by one to find the offender.
- Rule out the theme: rename the active folder in wp-content/themes so WordPress falls back to a default theme (Twenty Twenty-*). If the screen clears, the theme is at fault, usually a recent functions.php edit.
- Raise the PHP memory limit: add define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); to wp-config.php, or set memory_limit = 256M in cPanel MultiPHP INI Editor. Exhausted memory produces a blank screen with no message.
- Read the server error log: in cPanel open the Errors section or the error_log file next to the script. It shows the PHP fatal error and any missing extension or PHP version you can switch in MultiPHP Manager.