What was the last thing you did on your site before it went blank? Chances are high that you recently activated, modified, or updated a plugin. Plugins are the most common culprit behind the WSoD error, so if you made changes to one lately, your first action should be to deactivate it. If you reload your site and everything is back to normal, you’ve already found the source of your problem. You should then contact the plugin’s developer, or log a ticket in its support forum for further assistance.
However, sometimes it’s not that easy. If you haven’t just added a new plugin, it’s still likely that one of your existing plugins is causing compatibility issues behind the scenes.How can you tell if this is the case, and figure out which plugin is to blame? The easiest fix is to disable all of your plugins. That way, if a plugin is not to blame, you will know as soon as you reload your site. You can then activate them again, and move on to the next step in the troubleshooting process.
You can deactivate all your plugins at the same time by going to the Plugins screen in your WordPress dashboard and using the Deactivate option in the Bulk Actions drop-down menu.
If you can’t access the admin interface, you can still do this via an SFTP client or your host’s file manager. All you need to do is to connect to your site using your SFTP credentials and then locate the folder called wp_content/plugins.
If you rename this folder to anything else, such as plugins_test, you’ll automatically disable all plugins (since WordPress won’t be able to locate them). When you want to reactivate them, simply change the folder name back to plugins.
If your site does start working again after you have deactivated your plugins, you can be pretty sure that one of them is at fault. What you need to do now is to re-enable them, one at a time, and test the site after each one is activated. This way, you can easily tell which plugin is broken, as the site will go back down as soon as you enable it. Then you can deactivate the faulty plugin again, and get in touch with the developers for further support.
