What causes the White Screen Of Death

The white screen of death is caused due to your memory limit gets exhausted by a script. At that point, the script either becomes unresponsive, times out or crashes due to an exhausted server process.

Try these troubleshooting steps via FTP

• Rename your plugins folder – If a plugin is the problem, renaming your plugins folder will cause WordPress to not load any plugins inside that folder.
• Try changing your custom theme to the default WordPress theme.
• Check for caching configuration issues – Clear your browser cache and your caching plugin.
• Increase the memory limit – This can be done through the wp-config.php file on many WordPress installs. Open the file and add the following code: define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’); If that didn’t to work, open your .htaccess file to increase the memory limit. Add the following line of code: php_value memory_limit 64M. If you can’t access your .htaccess file, you can use your php.ini file to increase the memory limit instead. To do that, connect to your server via FTP. In the root directory of your site, look for the php.ini file. Once you locate it, add the following line anywhere inside the file: memory_limit = 64M.
• Troubleshoot any possible database issues.
• Enable Debug Mode to Catch Errors in WordPress – To enable debug mode in WordPress, open wp-config.php and add the following line of code: define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);

After trying the steps above, try updating or even going back a version of PHP running on your web host. Just because you upgrade to the latest and greatest doesn’t mean it will perform any better. In fact, it may perform worse, or in my case take down 20 websites at once. Luckily I was able to get them all back up just as quick.

If none of the above worked, there could be an issue with your web hosting service. In this case you should address the issue with your web host. If they are unable to help, you might need to hire someone like me.

Please post questions or comments below.