The WordPress White Screen of death (WSoD) is a blank page with no content and no error message. Your site loads, but there’s nothing there. On WordPress 5.2 and later you may instead see “There has been a critical error on this website,” which is the same underlying failure, just caught earlier. Either way, PHP stopped executing before WordPress could render a page.
The most common triggers: a plugin or theme with a fatal PHP error, a PHP Memory Limit that a plugin exhausted, or a corrupted .htaccess file. A plugin update is the single most frequent immediate cause.
Step 1: Check for a recovery email from WordPress #
On WordPress 5.2 and later, when a fatal error occurs WordPress emails the admin address (set under Settings > General) with a recovery link. Check that inbox before doing anything else. The email subject is “Your Site Is Experiencing a Technical Issue.” Clicking the link puts WordPress into Recovery Mode, which shows you which plugin or theme caused the error and lets you deactivate it directly. This is the fastest path if the email arrived.
Step 2: Run a Loupely diagnosis if you can access a page #
If the white screen affects specific pages but not all of them (for example, the admin area still loads but the front end is blank), navigate to any page that still loads, open the Loupely popup, and run a diagnosis. The PHP error capture will include the fatal error from the white-screened page if it occurred within the capture window. This identifies the specific plugin file and line number without requiring FTP access or enabling debug mode.
Step 3: Try the wp-admin URL directly #
Navigate to yourdomain.com/wp-admin. If the admin area loads while the front end is blank, the problem is in a theme or a plugin that only runs on the front end. Log in, go to Plugins > Installed Plugins, deactivate all plugins using the bulk action, and reload the front end. If it loads, reactivate plugins one at a time until the blank page returns. That identifies the culprit.
Step 4: If you can’t access wp-admin #
When the white screen blocks both the front end and the admin area, deactivate plugins via your hosting file manager or FTP. Navigate to wp-content/plugins/ and rename the entire plugins folder (for example, to plugins_disabled). Reload your site. If it comes back, rename the folder back to plugins, then deactivate plugins one by one from the admin area to find the specific conflict.
If renaming the plugins folder doesn’t fix it, try switching to a default WordPress theme the same way: rename your active theme’s folder inside wp-content/themes/. WordPress will fall back to a default theme. If the site loads, your theme had the fatal error.
Step 5: PHP memory exhaustion #
If neither plugins nor theme is the cause, PHP memory exhaustion is the next most likely culprit. Add define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M'); to your wp-config.php file before the line that says “That’s all, stop editing!” Reload. If the site recovers, a plugin or theme was consuming more memory than the server allowed. Contact your hosting provider about permanently increasing the PHP Memory Limit.