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.
Same-day diagnosis. 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: same-day look, flat quote, and the $229 flat repair covers most cases of exactly this.
Single Error Fix — buy it now, skip the hunt.
One error, hunted down and fixed — 500s, white screens, redirect loops, broken pages.
Covers one specific error or broken behavior on one site. Diagnosis, the fix, and a plain-English note on what happened. If we can't fix it, you get a full refund.
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.
Blank screen, full diagnosis, flat quote.
Send the symptom, get a same-day look and a flat quote from the developer who's fixed this exact thing more times than either of us can count.