WP Version 3.9.1 Causing Blank Pages in Admin & Website

Try:
– switching to the default theme automatically by renaming your current theme’s folder inside wp-content/themes and adding “-old” to the end of the folder name using FTP or whatever file management application your host provides.

– resetting the plugins folder by FTP or phpMyAdmin.

– re-uploading all files & folders – except the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php & root .htaccess files – from a fresh download of WordPress. Make sure that you delete the old copies of files & folder before uploading the new ones.

– running the upgrade manually via wp-admin/upgrade.php

Thanks Esmi! Renaming the theme folder got the dashboard back. I was then able to re-activate my original theme. Now all of my widgets are gone, which I understand can happen when switching themes. However, they’re not even displayed in the dashboard as Inactive, though I can see them in the database (Options table). How can I restore my widgets?

Have you checked the Inactive Widgets pane?

Yes but unfortunately they’re not listed there.

That is very strange. It could be a theme issue. What theme were you using? Where did you download it from?

I’m using the Rescue theme downloaded from Themeforest.

I’m sorry but as this is a commercial theme, you will need to seek theme-specific support from the theme’s developer/vendor. We do not have access to, nor do we support, commercial products here.

Have you tried deactivating all plugins to rule out any plugin interference?

So there’s no general work-around to restore text widgets that are still stored in the WordPress database? For what it’s worth, they don’t even show as Inactive Widgets when I switch to the Twentyfourteen theme.

Well, to close out this topic – my original problem was resolved with Esmi’s recommendation to rename the active theme via ftp in order to temporarily disable it. This gained me access to the dashboard again, from which I was able to re-activate my theme. Still not sure why it “broke” in the first place.
My secondary issue of losing all my text widgets in the process, however, was only resolved by recreating them from scratch.