David R Storms.com

Anyone ever have their Wordpress site come up blank? Well if you are a frequent visitor of this site you might have noticed for the last little while it wasn’t responding, and would eventually just be a blank page.

First of all, I apologize for not fixing it sooner. I had simply thought my net connection was out and it was just me. Turns out it was the site and I must have been down more than a day, maybe more than two!

After Googling a bit, I found out that it could possibly be a plugin. However since I couldn’t even get to the site myself I couldn’t very well do anything about it, or could I?

If you have access to your MySQL database, you can totally do something about it. I use phpMyAdmin, so I was able to get at the table. Here is a screen shot:

Here is what you have to do:

1. Locate your database and select it
2. Pick the wp_options table
3. Click the SQL button and enter the query: select * from wp_options where option_name=’active_plugins’
4. Click GO on this query
5. You will see a row like above, click the Pencil icon to edit the row
6. You want to copy all of the text in the textarea box that is shown, this text is what plugins are turned on for the site. I had no way to know which one was the problem, so I copied all of this text to a separate file.
7. Delete the text in the box so that it is empty, then click GO. This will disable all the plugins.

When I did this my site came back up no problem. I then went in as admin and turned on the plugins I was using. Each one I turned on I made sure the site came up.

I also upgraded a couple of them too. Perhaps one of them needed an important update, and I had to disable it in order to upgrade it and then activate it again…who knows.

Anyway the blog is fine now, if anyone else has this problem I hope they find this article and I hope it helps.