Uh Oh! My WordPress Blog Is Blank!!!

Posted in: 11 Comments
October 19, 2008

Seeing that dreaded blank WordPress page is never a pleasant sight. There are no error message nor any other indication of what might have gone wrong. So finding and fixing the problem can be very frustrating and time consuming.

And as you can probably imagine, with over 50 WordPress websites under our belt, we’ve seen our fair share of blank pages.

So before you pull your hair our, take a look at our list below. Hopefully we can save you some trouble.

Blank WordPress: Things That Might Have Gone Wrong

The list is arranged in order of most common to least common, as from our experience.

1. Incomplete upload of core WordPress files.

If you have just installed or upgraded WordPress and it just shows you that White Screen of Death, you might not have uploaded all of the core files. And even if you are sure that all files are uploaded, its good to upload again just to be sure.

We had this problem, for example, when dealing with a bad web host which repeatedly timed out and didn’t give any indication that files were being selectively uploaded.

Your FTP client could also be at fault.

To ensure complete upload of files, one simple method is to upload the entire zipped directory and then unpack it on the server.

2. Theme files are not uploaded.

If you are upgrading your blog, be sure not to overwrite the wp-content directory. But if theme files have been deleted, you will need to upload them or switch to the default theme to see your blog. Additionally, when moving your blog, be sure to keep the wp-content directory, or at least your theme files.

3. Incompatible Plugins.

Plugins have very limited compatibility and do not function with all versions of WordPress. So before upgrading or installing a plugin, check for full compatibility. Additionally, not all plugins play nice with one another. So you might have to disable or delete any new plugins to restore your website.

4. Bad, Corrupt, or Incomplete Theme Files.

Sometimes, the problem lies with the theme. If you’ve just set a new theme or edited your theme and noticed this error, then go back and undo whatever you did.

5. WP config file

Believe it or not, your wp-config.php file could be the culprit. Colin McNulty, who spent half a day finding the problem on his blog, rants:

You getting it yet? Yep, it’s an empty line. That’s all it is. 1 single solitary NewLine at the bottom off the file, right after that ?> a Carriage Return & Line Feed in programmers speak. That’s it. You hit the Enter key in one wrong place and the whole pack of cards comes tumbling down! Shocking, just shocking.

So, if you are editing your wp-config file, beware! Avoid any unnecessary empty lines. Colin McNulty also advises us to beware of nefarious spaces, because who knows what they’re capable of!

6. Permissions

Depending on your web host, if your files do not have sufficient permissions, then your pages will not be shown. And you’ll get an instance of the Blank Page of Death. For information, on changing permissions, see the WordPress Documentation Changing File Permissions.

7. Not a clue…

If you’ve tried everything and have not been able to find a solution, you might just have to restore your blog from a backup, or simply reinstall WordPress. But before you do so, you might want to try Andrew Ooi’s fix below.

Make WordPress Tell You What’s Going On!

We didn’t even think of this one, but ex-PHP programmer Andrew Ooi did. On his blog, he explains the process of forcing WordPress to give error reporting, thus giving you an alternative to the mysterious blank page.

In a video tutorial, he explains the process of creating an error reporting file called tester.php with the following code:

<?
ini_set(’display_errors’,'1′);
ini_set(’display_startup_errors’,'1′);
error_reporting (E_ALL);include(’index.php’);
?>

For full details, visit Andrew Ooi’s blog here.

 

Have a different blank page fix? Let us know.

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11 Responses to “Uh Oh! My WordPress Blog Is Blank!!!”

  • On December 21st, 2008 at 8:44 pm, Mike Landis wrote:

    What if the entire blog is fine except the default page? I can go to /whatever/ and the page is there, the widgets work, the links to other posts and pages all load completely, … except that / is blank after the 2.7 upgrade. The file permissions meet your spec above, it behaves the same if all plug-ins are disabled or if the four I’m using are enabled. The wordpress default theme behaves just as the others do - okay on all pages except the default one. There must be something else.

  • On December 21st, 2008 at 9:01 pm, Velvet Blues wrote:

    Well, assuming that you aren’t implementing caching…

    1. How many posts do you show per page? I know of one fix, where someone simply lowered the posts per page to a ‘reasonable’ number. (ie. less than 1000)

    2. If that doesn’t work, do you have any error logs that you can look at? If not, use the code sample above to turn on error reporting… The only other think that I can think of is an incomplete upload of files…

    If you find a solution, please let me know. I’ve visited your site, and this is quite perplexing…

  • On December 21st, 2008 at 9:16 pm, Velvet Blues wrote:

    One more thing. When you checked compatibility with the default theme, was it the default theme which came with the 2.7 release? Or was it the default theme in your previous themes folder?

  • On December 21st, 2008 at 9:20 pm, Mike Landis wrote:

    Sorry, I included something that looked like an HTML tag…

    There’s no caching enabled. Ten posts per page (I read that post too - he said 2000 wouldn’t work any more (in 2.7), but 1250 would work. I have injected the code above in index.php - no errors are coming out.

    There’s no content missing… I can switch the default page around. After switching, the page that used to be blank will display just fine (if you address it via permalink), but the new default page will be blank (from it’s permalink). The [blog_root] is blank no matter which page is configured as the default content, including configurations showing ‘the last 10 posts’.

  • On December 21st, 2008 at 9:26 pm, Velvet Blues wrote:

    Yeh… I am at a loss here. The only think that I’d think might be the problem would be an incomplete upload of WP files, or perhaps an undiagnosed 2.7 bug. I’ll do some research for you and post whatever I find.

  • On December 21st, 2008 at 9:32 pm, Mike Landis wrote:

    All themes behave identically, including the wordpress default theme.

    I reloaded the upgrade already. No change.

  • On December 22nd, 2008 at 10:54 pm, Velvet Blues wrote:

    Mike, I see that your site is up… What solution did you use?

  • On December 22nd, 2008 at 11:36 pm, Mike Landis wrote:

    First I renamed [blog_root]index.php so wordpress couldn’t find it and tried to get any permalink to load. Of course, everything was broken. Then I put it back and retried. After a very long wait (probably doing some sort of cache cleanup or refresh), I got the default content using its permalink.

    I also found that I could switch the default page around and get whatever was the new default from its permalink too. The [blog_root] was still blank though.

    Then I tried reloading [blog_root] and it came right up (no waiting). So, it appears to have been a browser caching issue.

  • On December 23rd, 2008 at 7:31 am, Velvet Blues wrote:

    Wow. We’ll I am glad that it is working for you, but it has got to be frustrating knowing that you did a whole lot of research and troubleshooting only to find that the problem was much simpler to fix.

    Thanks for letting me know how you did it.

    By the way, you have an interesting blog. Now that I can freely browse it, I’m quite intrigued. You’ll definitely see me over there. :-)

  • On December 23rd, 2008 at 7:57 am, Mike Landis wrote:

    It will be nice to see comments that aren’t SPAM. Thanks

  • On June 2nd, 2009 at 9:10 am, subbu wrote:

    thanks for the tut. the theme was not uploaded and i had to reactivate the default theme for the changes to take effect.

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