White Screen of Death on WordPress

You try to log into your WordPress website one day and white is all your see. No message, no error notifications. Nothing! Yikes!!! You think that it might be a mistake.. you try another browser.. and still you see that white screen of death. We all dread this sort of problem. Here are some things you might want to try:

Clear your browser caches. Some browsers like Chrome allow you to clear your browser in a certain time frame (past hour, day etc.)

Disable plugins

Your first step is to try disabling your WordPress plugins one by one and see if that solves the issue. This is due to the fact that nine times out of ten plugins are the culprit for login and white screen issues. You can disable them by renaming them via FTP. (Eg. Add an ending to each folder called “.disabled” or “.null.” Start with any caching plugins then go down the list and each time see if disabling that plugin resolves matters.

It’s been about a week now since the 4.0 update for WordPress codenamed “Benny” was released. Overall, 4.0 makes the step from draft to publishing a much more seamless experience and I love it.

The new update includes a lot of bug fixes and security updates as well as lots of nice nifty new features that WordPress enthusiasts will love. Video embeds are so much easier now. All you have to do is paste in the URL directly from your web browser into your blog post; no more looking for the video embed codes. In addition, WordPress 4.0 supports more sites not just YouTube Sites like WordPress.tv, Ted.com, Vimeo.com, Spotify.com and a ton of other media sites are all supported with this new feature. Furthermore, video and audio files are playable right within the editor.

Plugins are a lot easier to find with the new interface as well. Instead of an all text interface, the plugin view now sports thumbnail pictures of all the plugins plus a whole lot more detailed information that you will find useful. Even currently installed apps show more detail than they ever did before. Without even opening the page, you can more easily see how popular a plugin is as well as when it was updated and even if its compatible or not with your current version of WordPress. Clicking the “More details” link opens up a pop-up window giving you a more detailed description of the plugin. Prior to this you had to go directly to the WordPress.org page for the plugin in another browser window or tab. Certainly the new plugin view makes this makes plugin searches and selection a whole lot easier.

Editing and viewing your posts is a lot more fluid as well. With 4.0 you get a better picture of what your finished masterpiece will look like on your blog page. The new media library, sports an interface with infinite scrolling of your uploaded media. I find this is a great tool to find any broken media as I do occasionally find. Being able to scroll my media lets me find things more easily. The editing window fits your content as you write and keeps the formatting toolbar in view even as you scroll your post, kind of the same way you might freeze panes in Microsoft Excel.

Ultimately, I think the 4.0 update makes the WordPress interface more fun!

Do you find WordPress updates for all your multiple WordPress installs to be a pain? Well I am here to tell you that I am in love with a service called ManageWP . ManageWP enables you to administer and work with all of your WordPress sites at once from a single interface. An update session with each and every one of your WordPress sites can be as much as 40 minutes of your time.

Prior to using this service, I had several under-used blogs collecting dust. I would visit them every once in a while to do mostly major updates then I would forget them for another 4-6 months. Certainly this leaves a lot to risk. A spammer could hack your site and wreck havoc with your blog and even use it as an avenue for spam. Now I feel I have greater control of everything and WordPress updates even the daily ones aren’t such a chore. Pressing one “update all” button updates the plugins and themes for every single WordPress site I own if I choose. I can also update each site selectively or individually as an option.   ManageWP also allows you to :

• moderate and delete spam comments * Create, post and schedule blog posts
• Clone and migrate your WordPress sites * Optimize your SEO * Search for and add new plugins to some or all of your domains at once.
• Check Google Analytics stats for your sites
• Backup and restore your sites. You can back up  directly to your server or any of the popular 3rd party options including Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, FTP/SFTP or even email. Scheduling your backups is also available. * Check the security and reputation of your domains
• Send client reports to people you manage WordPress domains for.

Furthermore, anything that isn’t built into ManageWP’s interface you can do through the native WordPress that it provides. All this comes with amazing 24/7 support and regular email status updates from ManageWP  keep you on top of everything on your dashboard allowing you to get to the business of using your WordPress sites. I feel more informed and in control of my WordPress sites without having to check a bunch of different emails and logging into a bunch of WordPress admin sites.