White screen of death
All white, no error, no clue. The screen every site owner dreads.
The white screen of death is a 500 error with the courtesy removed: PHP crashed so early it never even produced an error page. The good news — it's almost always one of four things, and all four are fixable.
Diagnosis within one business day (Mon–Fri). Flat quote before any fix.
What’s actually happening
A blank white page means the code fatally errored before rendering anything — and error display is (correctly) turned off for visitors, so you get silence instead of a stack trace. WordPress since 5.2 sometimes catches this with a 'technical difficulties' email to the admin address; if that email exists, it names the failing plugin outright.
The blankness is uniform but the cause rarely is: what broke, when it broke, and whether wp-admin still loads narrow it down fast. A white front end with a working admin is a theme or front-end plugin; white everywhere is deeper — memory, a core file, or a fatal in something that loads on every request.
The usual causes, ranked
After twenty-seven years of these calls, the odds are well mapped. Start at the top.
A fatal error in a plugin or theme
The dominant cause — usually right after an update or a new install. PHP hits the error and stops cold.
Exhausted PHP memory
The page's needs outgrew the limit — often after adding a page builder, a big importer, or an image-heavy plugin. Blankness appears intermittently, heaviest pages first.
A broken core or theme file
Interrupted updates and migrations leave half-written files. The site is missing part of itself.
A caching layer serving a blank page
The error was temporary but the cache captured it and keeps serving the blank — the site is fixed underneath and nobody can tell.
What you can safely try first
Nothing below can make things worse — that’s the selection criterion. Anything riskier belongs in professional hands, on a backup.
- 1
Check the admin email inbox
Modern WordPress emails the site admin when it catches a fatal — subject 'Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue' — and names the plugin and file. That one email can end the whole investigation.
- 2
Try wp-admin and one deep page
Front-end white with admin alive means theme or front-end plugin territory — and means you can still work. Both white means config, memory, or core.
- 3
Clear caches — browser, plugin, host, CDN
If the underlying error was transient, a stale cache is the only thing still broken. This is the one genuinely free fix on the list.
Stop and call when…
- No technical-difficulties email arrived and both front end and admin are blank
- It followed a migration or a host change — the missing-file scenarios
- You're about to edit wp-config or code by hand on the live site
From there it’s our job: a look within one business day, flat quote, and the $249 flat repair covers most cases of exactly this.
Site Down or White Screen — buy it now, skip the hunt.
500 and 502 errors, a white screen, a database connection error, a site that broke after a PHP update.
Back online first, then the cause. A full backup once it is up, and a note on what failed and how to keep it from happening again. We start within one business day (Monday–Friday) of payment. Full refund if we can't fix it.
Questions we hear a lot.
Is the white screen the same as a 500 error?
Same family — both are PHP failing — different manners. The 500 at least sends an error status; the white screen crashed too early or has display disabled. Diagnosis is identical: read the log, find the fatal, name the file.
WordPress emailed me about a 'technical issue.' Now what?
That email names the failing plugin or theme and includes a recovery-mode link that loads admin with the culprit paused. It's WordPress handing you the diagnosis — from there the fix is deliberate rather than exploratory. Forward it to us and the quote is nearly instant.
Only my homepage is white — everything else works. Why?
Something that only the homepage loads: a hero slider, a featured-content widget, a page-builder section. The narrowness is good news; the suspect list is one template long.
Will restoring a backup fix it?
If the cause was a change, yes — but restoring without knowing the cause risks reinstalling the same failure, or rolling back orders and content you wanted. Diagnose first, restore second, and only onto a copy when stakes are high.
Related symptoms & help
Errors travel in packs. If this one visited, check its friends.
- 500 Internal Server ErrorThe same crash, with a status code attached.
- Database Connection ErrorThe blankness that names its cause.
- WordPress Login LoopWhen admin is the thing that's broken.
- Emergency RepairFully down, right now? Jump the queue.
- WordPress Done RightBuilds that don't white-screen on update day.
- Hacked SiteHacked WordPress
- SSL ExpiredExpired SSL certificate
- Maintenance ModeStuck in maintenance mode
Blank screen, full diagnosis, flat quote.
Send the symptom, get a look within one business day and a flat quote from the developer who's fixed this exact thing more times than either of us can count.