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.

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.

There are quite a few administrative things to do when setting up your WordPress blog for the first time. Some of these items may be on your to do list and others may not.  So here is my basic list:

The Basic Security & Back-up:

• Check to see that “your display as” name on your blog isn’t the same as your WordPress login/username. This is done for security reasons.

• Setup basic security: This is an important issue for every WordPress admin. WP Security Scan, Better WP Security and Website Defender are all great plug-in candidates to get you started.  Generally, I don’t worry about security too much because my site is hosted on WP Engine.   You can read my review on WP Engine here.

• Upload and active essential plugins including Akismet which usually comes installed with your installation by default.  Yes your blog can receive spam from day one, so to nip it in the bud set up Akismet right away. You don’t want unwelcome links or bots sniffing around on your site.

•  Set up caching so WordPress loads pages faster.

•  Setup a backup system for your blog. Again, If you go with my host WP Engine  you wont need a back up system or caching, because they provide back-up and caching for you.

Basic SEO (Most Can Be Found In The Settings/General Tab):

• Erase or replace the “just another WordPress blog” tagline. That’s unless you want to keep it that way. I’d rather personalize my site with another tagline of my own or just leave it blank.

• Change your permalinks to “Postname.” Otherwise the URL posted with the default settings will generally be your URL followed by the post number(s). Changing your permalinks to Postname will generally change the end of your post URL to

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I attended my first WordCamp in NYC earlier this summer and all I can say is it was a blast.

The development side of WordPress  does seem to have a steep learning curve, but that didn’t stop the WordPress organizers from providing informational sessions for attendees from all different levels and abilities. There was even a blogger and Pro Blogger track which I’m sure many appreciated. The best part of it all was the networking of course and I met many talented and helpful people along the way.

At Baruch College where WordCamp NYC 2012 was hosted did feel a bit crowded. Many of the classrooms were overflowing requiring some attendees to sit on the floor or stand out in the hallway. Surely this owes to the increasing popularity of WordCamp in New York City and elsewhere. In addition, it is a fairly cheap conference to attend so that may owe to the venue that was chosen. If you ask me I’d rather have a more crowded venue than some overly expensive hotel and conference fees any day of the week.

The best thing about WordCamp  is its a year around affair. There are local WordCamps in cities around the world. And you can catch

One of the features touted about the latest WordPress 3.2 release is that its lighter and faster.  So why is being lighter and faster important? Because having a lighter and faster website makes it easier for your blog visitors stick around. Just think about it, who likes slow websites anyway? If your site takes too long to load you run the risk visitors will quickly navigate to another site. So here are a couple of simple ways to optimize  WordPress.

Reduce Your Plugins

Yes we all love plugins and there are quite a number I can’t live without. But if you are trying to optimize WordPress you want to make sure you reduce them as much as possible. Why? Because  plugins have the potential to impact your blog performance. They will sometimes draw extra (http) requests as in the case of some social plugins. Personally I try not to go with more then 20 or 30 plugins but bit for some others that might even be too many.