WordPress White Screen of Death

I didn’t know WordPress could cause such a headache, but it did today. I got the white screen of death and was left with lots of admin side issues.

What happens is you can’t login, or, if you were previously logged in, you can’t mange plugins. All you can do is get a blank white screen. Even the WYSIWYG editor would not load.

I think what it had to do with automatically updating pugins in WordPress 2.6 I don’t know why, but it made WordPress very unhappy.

Lucky for me, I had all the plugins backed up and was able to delete all my plugin files and re-upload the old ones. Yes they are all begging to be upgraded again, but the blog is working and that’s much more important.

Thanks to Get Found Now for writing about the issue. Their article lead me to my own conclusion that worked.

About Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of TopRank's B2B Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on B2B marketing topics including content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely running, traveling or cooking up something new.

Comments

Mitch says

August 2, 2008 at 9:58 pm

I know what you did because I experienced the same thing, then wrote about it on my blog. What you had to do was update the Automatic Update plugin first, then update the blog. I did that with my other blog and it worked perfectly.
cesar says

August 5, 2008 at 5:18 am

it was the wordpress-automatic-upgrade 1.2.1 plugin upgrade in my case.
seo pixy says

August 14, 2008 at 4:54 am

That never happened to me but if it does, now I know how to manage so thanks a lot for the post!
Amanda says

August 18, 2008 at 7:45 pm

I cannot, for the life of me, fix my blog. I found your blog when I googled my comment error.. and tried to follow your advice.. but …. I guess either I don’t understand it, or .. anyway.. point is I’m making an even bigger mess and I dont know how to fix it!
Thomas says

October 8, 2008 at 9:49 am

Amanda – Try deactivating all plugins. Then upgrade your software and run the update script. Next re-activate your plugins on at a time until the error comes back. Then you may be able to find the plugin causing the issue. Once you have that, delete the old plugin files and upload new ones. See if that helps.
BloggerSavvy says

December 14, 2008 at 10:10 am

This worked for me. THANK YOU!
I deactivated all plugins and reactivated each, one-at-a-time, then tested. I isolated the one that was causing the white screen and left it deactivated.
Thanks again, appreciate the help. 🙂
Janice says

December 12, 2009 at 12:58 pm

After upgrading my WordPress blog, I got the white screen. Everything was still in tact, my blog wouldn't show. I deactivated all plug-ins, that was not the problem. What happened when upgrading is that it changed my theme. I had to go back in and re-activate my theme. Now it works.