White Screen Of Death…
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:
- Locate your database and select it
- Pick the wp_options table
- Click the SQL button and enter the query: select * from wp_options where option_name=’active_plugins’
- Click GO on this query
- You will see a row like above, click the Pencil icon to edit the row
- 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.
- 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.