The site stopped opening and shows a blank white screen, or the line “There has been a critical error on this website”. They are two faces of the same problem — something inside WordPress broke — and they are solved the same way.
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The white screen is the old version. Up to WordPress 5.2, a fatal error left the page blank with no explanation. From 5.2 onwards it shows the critical error message, which is the same fault with better manners. If you still see blank white, you are probably on an old version — and that alone is a security problem.
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Before touching anything, have a way back. Every step below changes site files. Take a backup first — see how to restore your data with JetBackup. Without one, a wrong move turns a broken site into a lost site.
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Start with the e-mail: Recovery Mode
This saves you the rest of the article more often than not, and almost nobody knows it exists. When there is a critical error, WordPress e-mails the administrator a special link. That link opens the dashboard with the broken plugin paused — and tells you which one it is.
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Check the mailbox of the WordPress administrator address. Look for “Your site is experiencing a technical issue”. Check spam too.
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Open the link in the e-mail. It signs you into the dashboard and WordPress names the culprit.
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Disable or update that plugin, then exit Recovery Mode.
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If the e-mail never arrived — because the address is wrong or the site cannot send mail — carry on.
See the error without showing it to the world
The next step is making WordPress say what is wrong. There is a right way and a wrong way to do that.
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Do not put errors on your visitors’ screens. Many guides say to set WP_DEBUG to true and leave it there. That writes error messages onto the public page, with file paths and database names on show for everyone. On a live site that is a security problem stacked on the one you already had.
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The right way sends the error to a file. In cPanel open File Manager, go into public_html, edit wp-config.php and set all three lines:
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define( 'WP_DEBUG', true ); — turns diagnostics on
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define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true ); — writes to a file
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define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false ); — and shows it to nobody
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Reload the page with the error, then open wp-content/debug.log. The last line nearly always names the guilty file — and the path tells you whether it is a plugin or the theme.
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Turn it back off when you are done. Leaving diagnostics on fills the disk and keeps information that should not sit around. Set WP_DEBUG back to false and delete debug.log.
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The three causes, in order
| Cause |
How to confirm |
| A plugin |
By far the most common. An outdated plugin, or two that stopped getting along after an update |
| The theme |
Usually turns up right after changing or updating the theme, or after a WordPress update |
| Out of memory |
The log shows Allowed memory size exhausted. Not broken code — the site simply does not fit in what it has |
Turning plugins off when you cannot reach the dashboard
If wp-admin will not open either, you can still switch everything off through the cPanel File Manager — or over FTP:
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Go into public_html/wp-content.
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Rename the plugins folder to plugins-off. WordPress stops finding them and disables the lot at once.
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Open the site. If it came back, a plugin is the culprit: rename the folder back to plugins and then disable them one by one in the dashboard until the error returns.
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Same trick for the theme. Rename the active theme’s folder in wp-content/themes. WordPress falls back to a default theme — ugly, but working, which is all you need to diagnose.
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Out of memory
If the log talks about exhausted memory, add this line to wp-config.php, above the line that says That’s all, stop editing:
define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );
If that is not enough, the plan’s own limit may be the ceiling — and then it is ours. Tell us the domain and what the log shows.
When none of this works
Restore a backup from before the day it started — see how to restore your data. It is the fastest route once an afternoon has already gone.
And if the error you see has a number — 500, 403, 404, 508 — the diagnosis is different: see website errors explained. If the site has never opened since you registered the domain, see registered the domain and it still does not open.
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How far we go. The server, PHP, the limits and the backups are ours. What lives inside WordPress — plugins, theme and whatever code was put there — is yours or your developer’s. We help work out which side the fault is on: see how far our support goes.
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