May 2023 – Evoke Digital

What Causes the White Screen of Death?

In summary, the WSoD is a totally blank screen which greets you whenever you try to access your website. Although there are lots of possible causes, you’ll typically discover the issue is right down to one of the following three:

Incompatibility in between your theme and a plugin (or plugins), or in between plugins.

A badly coded plugin or theme.

A low memory limit fixed by your hosting company (mainly observed in shared hosting environments).

Based mostly on these reasons, you can begin to create a plan of attack for coping with the WSoD.

Steps to Fix the White Screen of Death in Your WordPress Website

WSoD shows a plain blank page that could be hard to determine the main cause. However, if you are using the below methods, it is possible to fix the error swiftly and effortlessly. The methods that will be mentioned below are basically the most common solution to the principal issues:

Test Your Plugins

Do you recall the activity you carried out in your website lately, just before it going blank? You may have recently activated, altered, or updated any plugin. Plugins are often the major reason responsible for the WSoD error, thus if you have done changes to one recently, you need to instantly deactivate it. In the event after reloading your website, things are normal again, you’ve identified the cause of the problem. The following step would be to get in touch with the plugin’s developer, or log a ticket on its support forum for more assistance.

Take a Look at Your Theme

The same with your plugins, themes can also include outdated or incorrect code. There could be themes that are incorrectly coded, or create a conflict with one or two of the plugins. The issue also might be with installing or updating the theme which has left it unfinished. And finally, if you’ve done changes to the theme’s functions.php file, it could also result in an error.

Check Your Memory Limit

The WordPress hosting provider will assign a particular amount of memory into your installed plugins, or for files which execute scripts (like JavaScript), to be able to run correctly. In case this is fixed too low, it can possibly result in WSoD.

Make Use of the WordPress Debug Mode

In case you haven’t discovered the solution yet, you need to play differently then. You have to make use of the WordPress debug mode. WordPress’ debug mode is similar to a powerful telescope, helping you to refine on precisely what is wrong with your site.

In the event that you’re still encountering the WSoD right after performing all these steps, apart from clearing your browser’s cache, you might need to bite the bullet and speak to your hosting service provider for support.

1- Page speed is often confused with “site speed,” that’s in fact the page speed for any sample of page views on a website. Page speed could be referred to either in “page load time” (the time it requires to completely show the content on a particular page) or “time to first byte” (just how long it will take for your browser to get the first byte of information coming from the web server).

You could look at your page speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It is easy to access PageSpeed Insights at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/. You could enter the URL there and after a few seconds the tool will return a page with some results regarding your website’s performance. Towards the top, you will see a general score, that is an average of numerous factors.

SEO Best Practices

Google uses its algorithm to rank pages. And research has revealed that Google may be particularly calculating time to first byte as when it points to page speed. Additionally, a slow page speed implies that search engines could crawl less pages utilizing their allocated crawl budget, and this can adversely affect the indexation.

Here are a few of the numerous ways to boost your page speed:

Enable Compression

Make use of Gzip, a software application for file compression, to minimize the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files which are bigger than 150 bytes. Don’t use gzip in image files. Rather, compress these on a program such as Photoshop in which you could maintain control on the quality of the picture.

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Simply by optimizing the code (such as eliminating spaces, commas, as well as other needless characters), you could significantly boost your page speed. Additionally eliminate code comments, formatting, as well as unwanted code. Google suggests making use of CSSNano and UglifyJS.

Minimize Redirects

Every time a page redirects to a different page, your guest encounters more time awaiting the HTTP request-response cycle to finish. For instance, when your mobile redirect pattern appears like this: “example.com -> www.example.com -> m.example.com -> m.example.com/home,” every one of these 2 extra redirects can make your page load slower.

Eliminate Render-blocking JavaScript

Browsers need to develop a DOM tree by simply parsing HTML just before they could render a page. In case your browser runs into a script throughout this process, it must stop and execute it just before it could continue. Google advises preventing and reducing the usage of blocking JavaScript.

Leverage Browser Caching

Browsers cache plenty of information (images, stylesheets, JavaScript files, and a lot more) in order that whenever a visitor returns to your website, the browser doesn’t need to reload the whole page. Make use of a tool such as YSlow to determine if you have already an expiration date fixed for your cache. Then set the “expires” header based on how long you desire that data to be cached. Most of the time, except if your website design alters regularly, a year is a sensible period of time. Google has more details regarding leveraging caching here.

Boost Server Response Time

Your server response time is influenced by the quantity of traffic you get, the resources every page utilizes, the software your server utilizes, as well as the hosting solution you employ. To boost your server response time, search for performance bottlenecks such as slow database queries, slow routing, or perhaps a lack of sufficient storage and resolve them. The perfect server response time is less than 200ms.

Utilize a Content Distribution Network

Content distribution networks (CDNs), also known as content delivery networks, are networks of web servers which are utilized to distribute the load of delivering information. Basically, duplicates of your website are kept at multiple, geographically varied data centers in order that users have quicker and much more reliable access to your website.

Optimize Pictures

Make sure that your pictures aren’t any bigger than they should be, that they’re in the correct file format (PNGs are usually better for graphics with less than sixteen colors while JPEGs are usually better for pictures) and they are compressed for the web.