Random Blank Pages – w3 total cache

Yes, I too suffer from the white screen of death. W3 Total Cache is like the hot girlfriend who is perfect in every way, except she has a small crack smoking problem.

Mitul, I clicked the link to your tutorial… but sadly, all I got was the white screen of death.

Our hosting Liquid Web is going through this now to figure out the best solution to this.

We uninstalled W3TC plugin with the extra files and it wound up taking our server out (and we’ve got a very beefy dedicated one). They’ve been getting complaints of the same nature all month so they’re now working on a solution that we’ll share on here.

Has anyone tried reverting to an earlier version to see if that solves the problem?

What sucks is that I paid the developer (or his employee) to configure W3TC to work perfectly with my site and it appears you have to pay again if this type of issue comes up. $400 was a lot for something that only worked for a few months. Never again.

Now Inmotion Hosting and Liquid Web are recommending people just uninstall W3 Total Cache completely and use WP Super Cache as that’s not causing any issues whatsoever right now.

The blank page issue is really, really too bad… I tried quite a few caching plugins and none are as full-featured and comprehensive as W3. But alas, I simply cannot use it. :/

I am not any sort of expert – but I did want to chime in and say that I solved that white/blank page issue by unchecking the browser cache option. When I was installing W3TC, I did a lot of research/browsing and one person had mentioned that browser cache will sometimes mess up a display, so when I woke up one day, pulled up my beautiful site to admire it (Mirror, Mirror on the wall;0) and saw white, I remembered that caveat, clicked off browser cache, and I haven’t had the problem since.

It may not solve it for you, but it worked for me.

thanks njs, I tried that, but the issue seems to be that the plugin is now requiring us to clear the cache continually so we don’t get the blank white page.

when you unclick something on W3 Total Cache it clears the cache so it appears everything is fine, but after some more clicks, the white page comes. back.

I’ve even tried this with unchecking the page prime function to see if that is the issue.

Now that GoDaddy, InMotion Hosting and Liquid Web are letting their customers know to just completely uninstall W3TC and replace it with WP Supercache, I’m surprised that there’s not been a fix done on this after this period of time.

@njs ryt. I am still using w3tc no problem ryt now.. but when i started using w3tc its causes same problem for me..but i still want use w3tc cause without w3tc yahoo page speed ‘c’ grade even i use msxcdn. when i connect maxcdn to w3tc again i got white screen error. after compeletly uninstall w3tc. again i install w3tc and config correctly but never integrate maxcdn service now its working fine..so, if you are using cdn service then i must say don’t integrate cdn service with w3tc or wpcache…and w3tc leverage cache and cache header, mirror page in browser cache leave disable and write leverage browser cache manually in .htaccess file. its work better.

don’t use minify, object and databse cache…leave it by default..at lease your yahoo rank boost with w3tc…

when you have to turn off nearly all the selling points on a plugin, that’s not too good. it’s like if WordPress started letting all the things we like about it go into disarray and never bother fixing them…

This is a horrible plugin. I have tried everything possible and with every scenario I end up with the WCOD. I even replaced all the wordpress files. Reinstalled the plugin countless times, even doing into the dB and deleting all signs of w3. I wish the author would look into this. There has to be some loose end otherwise how can thousands of websites be running this plugin and thousands of users raving? I hope to see a response from the author soon.

the last time there were major issues with the plugin,it was over a year before they came back with a major change so we’ll see.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy fix for these issues as they require you to continually keep clearing cache which goes against why we even would use a caching plugin.

Seems like this problem is not fixed, right? Spent few hours installing and configuring everything, plugged in my S3, tuned everything up. It worked fast, I was happy. Than I just opened another browser (where there was no local cache for this website and I wasn’t logged as admin to wp) and saw a white screen. Googled, and I’m here.

Disabled page cache. Working for now, needs some additional tests. But hey, why use W3TC if I can’t cache pages?

It’s been a weird one since this same thing seems to be affecting all the caching plugins leading me to believe this has to do with the last WP update and all the plugins have some common script patterns.

I did a thorough check with my server just to make sure, but after extensive testing, it’s the caching plugins causing the issue.

Ironic that you have to keep clearing out the cache of the caching plugin to get it working properly. The fact that none of the caching plugin developers have really spoken of this definitely doesn’t look good for a fix any time soon.

I’ve spent all night trying different settings and checking if it works or not. Figured out that the problem (at least with my website) was with the Page Cache Debug turned on (WP Admin -> Performance -> General Settings, Debug section, Debug Mode: Page Cache ‘checked’). When turned off, cleared and rebuilt all caches – seems to work fine. Pages are cached, everything is working now for both logged in users and not, in different browsers etc. Tested via tools.pingdom.com, Google Page Speed and numerous other resources – all of them worked and showed good rating for my site. Before, when I had blank screen, tools.pingdom.com (and others) was loading only this blank white page. Now it seems to work. Will ask some friends to check the site tomorrow to see if someone will get the white screen. I hope not ??

BTW, had to turn off CDN as well, because all performance analyzing tools were telling me to minimize redirects from a CNAME mapped subdomain (media.mydomain.com) to Amazon S3 bucket (media.mydomain.com.s3.amazonaws.com). I thought mapping a subdomain to S3 bucket will not cause any redirects ’cause it goes on a DNS level. Seems like I was wrong. Anyway, for this particular website 98% of visitors are from Russia and Ukraine, server is located in Russia, so it serves static files to local visitors much faster than Amazon S3 – 25ms vs 150-200ms ping makes the difference.

THOR – I just disabled all debug and cleared the cache and the blank pages are gone!!!

Great Job!!!

Too bad the moderator or the developer could not come up with this simple suggestion

-AJ

AJOSHI0

keep an eye out and see if the blank page returns. when you make any slight changes on W3TC the blank page issue goes away temporarily as it does when you clear the cache. It returns again sadly.