Fix blank or white screen in WordPress
These instructions might help you to fix the blank or white screen in Wordpress (Edit post or New Post or other places) after or before updating WP core or plugins.
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Every WordPress core update introduces new features in addition to several bug fixes.
With lots of good features, it is possible that you mess up with existing WordPress setup and end up with WordPress white screen of death in WordPress upgrade.
Tip: Always take a backup of your live WordPress website before you make any changes or update theme, plugin, or any custom script.
These steps to fix WordPress blank screen or white screen of death have proven to be successful for many cases: –
Remove untested plugins
Disable the plugins that have not been tested with latest release of WordPress. Check if your problem is resolved. If yes, then try activating the untested plugins one by one to figure out which one is the culprit. Once done, report the issue to plugin support page.
Try another theme for a while
It is possible that your theme is using older functions or anything which is not compatible with the latest release of WordPress. Try enabling another theme like Twenty Twenty and see if your issue is resolved.
If you’re using a child theme, then first deactivate only child theme to see if the issue is with child theme only. In most cases, child themes are the issues as they add custom functionality to the parent theme.
Remove custom functionality or code for a while
The custom functionality in functions.php by your development team may cause issues in editor screens. They can also block the whole website to load and may show an error on site load.
You might be using custom post types, taxonomies, meta-boxes, or custom scripts. Either update them or remove them one by one to see which is actually affecting the editor screens or whole website.
Use Site Health Checker Tool
WordPress now comes with built-in site health checker tool which you can access from Dashboard side navigation > Tools > Health Check.
Incompatible PHP version: It is quiet possible that your website is on either very older version of PHP like PHP 5 or very newer PHP 7.3 or more. In both cases, we have observed inconsistencies.
We do not recommend to just updating the PHP at once just for white screen issue. This is because, updating the PHP version to newer may cause several other issues.
In case if you have gone through everything and your development team recommends to update PHP version then, you can contact server support to update the PHP version. Alternatively you can use PHP Manager tool in cPanel or in Site Manager tools in your server admin panel.
Cleaning .htAccess file may help
Cleaning or updating .htAccess file directly without actually knowing what you’re doing is not recommended. You can ask server support team or your in-house team to recheck the .htAccess file and clear the unwanted rules that may be blocking new WordPress resources to load properly.
Some other actions that may help
Besides other things that you may have already worked around, these are additional common steps to check if they work for you or not.
- Make sure you clear the cache after updating the WordPress files, WordPress theme files, WordPress plugin files
- Make sure you save the Permalinks again from Settings once again after updating
- Make sure you have not disabled JavaScript or using Ad Blocker in your browser that may be blocking certain resources to load in the back-end
- Make sure you update theme files, plugins, and any other custom files that you may have added for adding custom functionality like custom scripts
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