Don’t Be Frustrated, We Are Here To Help

Last week, we had a client whose site was getting errors and then during troubleshooting, White Screen Of Death.

White Screen Of Death? What is that now?

White Screen Of Death is just that: a blank, white screen glaring at you when you try to visit your blog. It may occur on full site or just admin area. In both cases, getting rid of it is not hard.

In this post, I am going to tell you about first steps that you should take to get rid of White Screen Of Death.

What Causes White Screen Of Death?

Before fixing, we need to know the things that can cause WordPress to show White Screen of Death.

Here are the common causes:

1. Plugin or Theme Install: Sometimes, a plugin or theme install can render your blog unusable by causing white screen. This is the most common problem and easiest to solve. 
2. Incorrect Code Modification: If you edit a plugin or theme file incorrectly, white screen can occur. It is also easy to solve.
3. WordPress Upgrade: It is another common problem. Sometimes, you may get the white screen out of nowhere after an upgrade.
4. Malware: If a virus or malware manages to gain access to your server, it may cause white screen. This is a bit difficult to solve.

Once you know what caused the problem, it is not very hard to troubleshoot. You need following software and data:

1. Filezilla: It is a free FTP client. Using it, you can access all the WordPress files. Download Filezilla here.
   
2. FTP Access To Server: You need your server’s IP address, a username and password combination. cPanel access also works well. You just need to be able to edit files on the server.

Fixing The Problem

Plugins

If the problem occurred after installing a plugin, it can be fixed by deleting that plugin.

Connect to your host via FTP and then go to /wp-content/plugins

Here, delete the plugin that you had installed most recently.

If you do not know about one plugin that was responsible, rename plugins folder to old_plugins and see if you site loads fine now.

If site works after renaming the plugins folder, change the name back to plugins, take a backup of site and start deleting plugins one by one to see the problem. Once you identify the problem, restore all plugins except that one by copying the plugin folders from backup folder to plugins folder.

Themes

If the problem was caused after a theme install, connect via FTP and then go to /wp-content/themes

Delete the theme that you most recently installed. Then try deleting the one that you are using(take backup, your customisations are important!).

That should solve the problem.

Incorrect Code Modification

If you were editing a file before the error, all you have to do is simply revert the changed back. If you follow the good WordPress habits, you should have a backup copy of your files.

Just access site via FTP or cPanel and simply paste older version there.

WordPress Upgrade

Most of the times, it happens due to a plugin or theme conflicting with changes made in new version of WordPress. You can fix the problem by troubleshooting the plugins and themes one by one. Try deleting the plugin and theme folders(after taking backup) and that should fix the problem.

Malware

If it is a malware, it may have affected the plugin or theme files. In worst case, it will affect core WordPress files. Try deleting plugins and themes.

In that does not help, download WordPress on your desktop and upload wp-includes and wp-admin folders to your server.

This will fix the problem.

Other Fixes

Sometimes, the error occurs when WordPress runs out of memory. To troubleshoot this, you can increase the memory limit. Just go to wp-config.php file via FTP and cPanel and add the following line to end:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Did these steps solve the problem for you? Let us know via comments.

If you still need help, just contact us for a quote.

The problem may be with the description, title or image of the shared pages. You know, the small pieces of information that tell users what the link is about.

If you optimise these values well, you can increase the traffic easily. In this post, I will show how you can optimize your blog for Social Sharing.

Add Open Graph Tags To WordPress

Open Graph Tags are used to tell social networks what they should display among other imformation. For example, we did not have Open Graph tags here on WordPress Blog Experts before writing this article and when homepage was shared using FaceBook, here is the info FB picked up:

Wrong Image. Oops!

However, with one simple plugin, all this was fixed. We have used WP Facebook Open Graph Protocol plugin for clients and ourselves and it is nice.

The best thing about it is install and forget approach. You just need to install the plugin and configure it once. After that, it handles all work for you. You need to provide a user/app id and an image. Apart from these, it will automatically generate all the information from the SEO settings.

To set up the plugin, you need following:

1. Your user id or app id.
2. A 200 x 200 pixel image as default or fallback image.

You will want to use user id if you are only person controlling the site. You can also create an app for your blog if you are not the sole owner. To get user ID, just go to http://graph.facebook.com/yourfbusername and you will get it. App ID is available in developer management section when you create an app.

Regarding image, I recommend using your logo.

Go to Media -> Add New from dashboard and upload image. If it is not already cropped, crop it using WordPress Image Editor. Copy the image URL as you will need it later.

Now, install WP Facebook Open Graph Protocol plugin and activate it.

After activation, it will display following message on top of your dashboard:

Click “enter you Facebook User ID or App ID” link.

On next page, just enter the required values.

Click “Save Changes” and you are done.

Testing The Changes

Run your homepage URL through Facebook Object Debugger and then try sharing the page. Here’s the result I got:

Right Image There Now

Make sure you run the URL through FaceBook debugger as it clears the Facebook’s cache. If you have a caching plugin installed, clear cache their as well.

Best this is that this does not work for Facebook only. Google+ and LinkedIn also use Open Graph, so the results will be same there.

If you want to customize the description etc. here are some hints:

• Homepage uses “Site Title” and “Site Description” under Settings -> General for title and description in Open Graph.
• Posts and Pages will pick up SEO plugin data automatically.
• Featured image gets highest priority as thumbnail. Images in post are next and at last, there is the fall back image.

Have you optimized your blog for social sharing? How was your experience?

• Use Medium Size, which is too small for anything to be visible.
• Use Fill Size, which will insert full sized image but in turn break your layout.

This is a common headache with WordPress and can be avoided easily by setting image size in Media Settings.

Before you start, here are some things you should know:

• The image size that you want for medium images. 300-500 pixel is a good range.
• Maximum width of your content column. Usually, it is around 600 pixel. However, I recommend using a tool like Page Ruler to measure exact width.

Now that you have all the data handy, go to your WordPress dashboard and follow following steps:

1. Go to Settings. Do not click, just hover your mouse over it.
2. Click “Media Settings”.
   
3. Enter the width in Medium and Large sizes. You can make height same or a bit larger since images can be a bit longer.
4. Click “Save Changes”

That’s it. You will never have to deal with those pesky sizes again.

If you have some other problem with WordPress, let us know.

Make Your Custom Menu Work for Your Readers

Here’s the “Build your own WP text widget in WYSIWYG editor  video.”