How to Fix the WordPress White Screen of Death

The white screen of death is not really an error — it is the absence of one. PHP hit a fatal error, WordPress was configured not to display errors, and the browser got an empty response. Nothing is broken beyond repair; you just cannot see what happened yet.

So the first move is never "reinstall WordPress". It is "make the error visible".

Step 1: Turn the error message back on

Edit wp-config.php over FTP, SFTP or your host's file manager, and find this line:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );

Replace it with:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false );

This writes errors to wp-content/debug.log instead of printing them to visitors — which matters if the site is live. Reload the broken page once, then open that log file. The last entry is your culprit, and it will name a file:

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function wc_get_product()
in /wp-content/themes/mytheme/functions.php on line 214

That single line tells you which plugin or theme caused it and where. Almost every white screen resolves itself the moment you read this.

Step 2: If the log points at a plugin

You cannot deactivate it from wp-admin if wp-admin is also white. Do it from the filesystem instead:

1. Connect over SFTP and go to wp-content/plugins/.
2. Rename the offending plugin's folder, e.g. woocommerce to woocommerce-off.
3. Reload the site. WordPress cannot find the plugin, so it silently deactivates it.

If you do not know which plugin it is, rename the whole plugins folder to plugins-off. That disables everything at once. If the site comes back, rename it back and disable plugins one at a time until the white screen returns — that is the one.

Step 3: If the log points at your theme

Rename the active theme's folder in wp-content/themes/. WordPress will fall back to a default theme like Twenty Twenty-Five if one is installed. The site will look wrong, but it will load, and you will be able to get into wp-admin.

If no default theme is present, upload one first — WordPress cannot fall back to a theme that is not there, and you will get a different error entirely.

Step 4: If it is a memory limit

A log line reading Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted is not a bug in any one plugin — it is the site as a whole outgrowing its allocation. Raise it in wp-config.php, above the "That's all, stop editing" comment:

define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512M' );

If that has no effect, your host caps PHP's memory_limit at a lower value and the WordPress constant cannot exceed it. Raise it in the hosting control panel, or ask support.

Treat a memory fix as a stopgap, though. Something is consuming 512 MB on a page load, and that something is usually a single badly-behaved plugin doing an unbounded query. The debug log will keep pointing at it.

Step 5: When only wp-admin is white

A white admin with a working front end usually means the error is in code that only runs in the dashboard — an admin-only plugin screen, or a theme's options panel. The same folder-renaming approach works; you are just looking at a smaller set of suspects.

The reverse — a white front end with a working admin — points at the theme or at a front-end-only plugin such as a page builder or a cache layer.

Step 6: Clear every cache before you judge the fix

Caching plugins, server-level caches like Varnish or LiteSpeed, and CDNs such as Cloudflare will happily keep serving the blank page after you have fixed it. Purge all of them, then test in a private window. More than one person has "fixed" the same white screen three times because they were looking at a cached copy.

Put the debug settings back

Once the site is healthy, set WP_DEBUG back to false and delete wp-content/debug.log. That file is publicly readable on many hosts and it records your file paths.

How to stop it happening again

• Update plugins and themes on a staging copy first, not on the live site at 5pm on a Friday.
• Keep one default WordPress theme installed permanently, so there is always something to fall back to.
• Make sure your host takes daily backups you can restore yourself without opening a ticket.
• Check the PHP version a plugin supports before you upgrade PHP. A large share of white screens are simply a plugin that has not been touched since PHP 7.4.