How To Fix Wordpress Blank Pages

Posted by User Image

John in August 16th, 2008

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Last week I experienced problems with EzGreatLife pages loading. Everytime you tried to load the site, you would simply get a blank webpage (pictured above). The site was down from about 10:00 PM Friday to 8:00 AM Saturday morning. First I would like to apologize to anyone who had problems visiting the site, dropping Entrecards, Etc. While I have no idea what caused the problems, I did figure out how to fix it. I googled it, read many blog posts and visited the Wordpress forums. I was unable to find any information on my particular problem. Eventually, I lucked into a solution. I wanted to share the symptoms and fix with you, in case you ever run into something similar. So here goes my attempt to explain how to fix wordpress blank pages.

PREREQUISITES

Self Hosted Wordpress blog
Some working knowledge of plugins
Ability to use FTP software. I use Filezilla

SYMPTOMS

You receive a blank page when your URL is loaded. It says “Done” in the bottom left corner of the browser window.
You receive a blank page when attempting to load the Wordpress admin screen. It says “Done” in the bottom left corner of the browser window.
You get the same results with any browser.

NOTES:

I had not added or changed any plugins for over a month.

So get on with it….

I was completely locked out of my blog. I tried using multiple browsers, clearing the cache and cookies. Nothing seemed to work. The weird thing is I was not getting any errors. No page 404 or not responding. Just “Done”, like everything was Okay. I initially thought I had been hacked and feared my database may have been compromised. I used my web host panel (phpMyadmin) to access the MySQL database. I searched for some key words and found the posts intact. I double checked my backup files. (I use WP-DBManager by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.) I checked the Wordpress folders, wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes. All files seemed to be there. At this point I started thinking maybe a rogue plugin might be causing the problem. I started renaming the plugin folders by adding the letter “a” on the file name. I went through each folder, trying to load EzGreatLife in between each rename. After reaching the last folder and no progress, I decided to sleep on it. It’s 2:00 AM, good night!

Up and at ‘em at 7:00 AM, refreshed and I had an idea.

How To Fix The Wordpress Blank Page Problem

I renamed the \plugins folder to \plugins.bak
I created a new empty \plugins folder

How do you do the voodoo that you do?

Like magic, I was back in business. Although half of my blog was missing, due to the lack of plugins. But at least my site was back in black and I could access my Admin!!! Next, I deleted the \plugin folder and renamed \plugins.bak to \plugins to test the fix. The blank page problem returned. So I quickly renamed \plugins to plugins.bak and created another empty \plugins folder. And once again EzGreatlife was loading like normal! I checked the permissions on the plugins folder and everything was set correctly. Hmmm….

Boring, Boring, Boring….

And so I started the monotonous task of moving each plugin folder (ie: akismet, all-in-one-seo-pack) over to the new \plugins folder. I tested the page loading in between each move. Everything worked, so I moved another plugin.

From strange to stranger…

Okay, here is the weird part. I moved ALL of my plugins, one at a time testing between each. After moving the last one, EVERYTHING STILL WORKED! So I renamed \plugins to \plugins.bk2 and renamed \plugins.bak to \plugins and the page would not load again. Scratching my head, I renamed everything back and the pages loaded. WTF?

I hate unsolved mysteries. But at least it’s fixed.

No More Blank Pages

So there you have it. I hope you found this information useful. I think the basic principles of what I did could be applied to other blogging platforms. If you have any ideas, questions or experiences that would help explain what happened or help others with similar problems please let us know!