If your Wordpress site or Dashboard loads to an all-white screen, or you receive an Internal Server error 500 when viewing your site, you will need to enable WordPress debug to see what plugin or theme is causing the issue. Once you have identified the culprit theme or plugin, you will need to move the directory containing the files out of the way.
You can enable WordPress debug mode by accessing the wp-config.php file and changing the line listed below from true to false.
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);
You will change this to
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
You can edit the wp-config.php file from the File Manager or by an SSH terminal connection. The full path to the wp-config.php file on the main page of a website is; /home/username/domains/example.com/public_html/wp-config.php
You will want to replace the username with your DirectAdmin username and example.com with your domain name.
Once you have enabled WordPress debug, please refresh your website. You should now see errors appear on your page. In most cases when you read the errors you will read the full path to file and what line number the issue appears on. In the full path, you will be able to see what theme or plugin is causing the issue.
Once you have identified the name of the theme or plugin, you will need to access the `wp-content/wp-themes` or `wp-content/wp-plugins` directory and rename the folder to the culprit theme or plugin. You can rename the folder from File Manager or by an SSH connection to your account.
Once you have renamed the plugin or theme folder, you can refresh your site and access the WordPress Dashboard to reinstall the culprit theme or plugin. Not all times does a reinstall of the theme or plugin resolve this issue. There are times an error is thrown due to the theme or plugin not being compatible with the version of WordPress you are running or you might need to change the PHP version you are using.
If you are running an outdated version of WordPress, you will want to update to the latest version. You should also make sure all themes and plugins are up to date with the latest version as well.
Once your site is loading properly again, you can disable WordPress debug mode by accessing the wp-config.php file and changing `true` back to `false`.
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
You will change this to
define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);
