How I Fought the Wordpress White Screen of Death and Won

If you’ve been to the site over the past ~5 days you might have noticed, well, nothing!  The screen was blank, the source code was empty.  Crap.  Yikes. To the casual observer it might have looked like I packed my bags, booked my ticket and flew this chicken coop for greener pastures.  I mixed my farm analogies there (sorry Doublemule) but you get the idea.  I’m trying to say that the site was broken but now it’s fixed – it was dead but now it’s risen – it was lost but now it’s found.

And you can too!

I’m going to share with you the story of how the site disappeared like an artifact in the Indiana Jones franchise and then reappeared after it was pulled back from the vacuous brink of digital ruin like the ending of every Matrix movie.

You Call This an Upgrade?

There are two ways to do an upgrade for wordpress, automatic and manual.  Both have pros and cons.  Lets compare them.

Automatic Upgrade

Pros: It’s fast and you can do it from the safety of your WP dashboard.

Cons: Things can break, horribly.  If you earn a living from your website (like me), then broken money streams are a problem.

So if things can break during the auto upgrade, why not just always do the manual upgrade, right?  Not necessarily.

Manual Upgrade

Pros: It’s safer and more controlled than the auto upgrade, in my opinion.

Cons: It’s slow and much, much more complicated.  Especially if you’re not comfortable using an ftp client or your control panel or mysql.

I tried to save some time (hey, I’m a busy guy) and went with the automatic upgrade last week.

Then All Hell Broke Loose

Seconds after my upgrade failed I knew I was in trouble,  my plugins began showing error messages on my main site.  Plugins are a common source of headaches during a WP upgrade because if one is not compatible with the new version, it can crash and pull your whole site down with it.  I realize that that is not a very technical explanation, but a ggl search will garner more information if you’re really interested in the dynamics behind it.

After another site reload, I noticed…nothing.  I found myself staring at a blank screen – the wordpress white screen of death.

How embarassing and annoying.  I’ve worked with plenty of WP sites and never had to deal with this before. Time to fix it.

Not so Fast

It was like a perfect storm, not only could I not access my WP dashboard, but my host had also locked off phpmyadmin for EVERYONE using their service while they resolveld some issues.

And so I sat and waited. And waited. And waited.

Days went by and my site was blank, which meant that no new tutorials could come out, no one with Thesis Theme questions could ask them, no new clients could find or contact me.

Ouch.

Things were looking up

My host enable phpmyadmin. Great! That let me log into my account and remove a ridiculously large amount of tweetbacks in my database that I can only assume was a bug.

But that still didn’t fix my site. So I exported my mysql database and moved on to trouble shooting my WP install, itself.

Unfortunately my ftp client decided to die on me.

Moving on, I got a new ftp client and logged into my account. I downloaded WP’s latest stable version and began replacing all my files EXCEPT wp-config.php and the wp-content folder. This took a long time.

Once all the new files were uploaded I check FoCP only to find that I STILL had a blank screen.

When will it end?

On a whim, I tried navigating to my wp-admin. Once there, it said that it needed upgrade my database. For whatever reason, that seemed to work.

Back in Business, Almost

So my site was back, but my plugins were gone and, therefore, a lot of my site’s functionality. I’ve spent the day manually uploading new plugins to replace those lost.

As of now, I’m almost back to full functionality, which is exciting. Now I just have to spend another week rebuilding the traffic that I lost as well as staying put with my schedule of meeting client deadlines etc.

So to recap how I solved the white screen problem:

Removed unnecessary files in my mysql database.
Manually replaced old WP files except wp-config.php and wp-content folder.
Upgraded my database.
Removed broken plugins, added new versions of those broken.

And that did it.  I’m back in business in every sense of the word.

So what was it like without a site?

Honestly, not that bad.  I mean, it’s scary to think that there are inevitably clients who want to contact me who are unable to and will probably work with someone else instead.  But at the same time, I stayed busy working on my current projects both online and off, and I got paid today, so it’s really been no big deal.

I have learned, though, that it’s important to have a backup, which I will shortly once a new site proprogates.  I’ve also learned a few things that I’d like to share regarding financial planning for freelancers.  But that will be another post for another day.

A sincere Thank You to those of you who are still around to read this and my my RSS feed and follow my Twitter account.  I can’t promise that mistakes won’t ever happen again, but I can promise that whatever I learn from them I’ll pass right on to you so that you can do better with your own online endeavors.

-Rob