WordPress: Blank Page on WP-Admin

Imagine this horror: You navigate to your usual WordPress wp-admin url and find nothing there but a blank page. You refresh the page, but nothing happens. Your administrator login window is gone and there is seemingly no way to access your WordPress backend. What happened and what do you do?

I’ve had this question before from a couple of clients, so I thought I’d take it up in a blog post.

So let’s roll up our sleeves…

If all you’re seeing is white space where your login window should be, you first need to establish what exactly went wrong. Chances are that you’ve recently added a new plugin or that you’ve altered some of the code in one of your php files. You’ll need to access your php files either through cpanel or with an FTP client so that you can correct the code that is creating the problem.

But what code in which file? Where does the source of this horror lie?

If all you get in the wp-admin url is a blank window, try going directly to your login url. In other words, instead of going to www.domain.com/wp-admin, go to www.domain.com/wp-login.php. At this point, WP will throw up a warning message for you, which should then give you some idea of what went wrong and where.

As an example, let’s take the “headers already sent” warning. This warning typically looks something like this:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/domain/public_html/wp-settings.php:340) in /home/domain/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line737

So what would this mean?

WordPress is telling you that your wp-settings.php file is the source of your problem and that you will need to correct the code in that file (and have a look at line 340 in particular) to make your problem go away. The fix is usually as simple as removing one unwanted line of space at the beginning or the end of the php code, or removing some other code garbage of this sort.

To make the correction, you would open up the wp-settings.php file either in cpanel or in a plain text editor and start by ensuring that the very first characters in that file are <?php and that very last characters in the code are ?>

There should be no extra space before or after these characters. If you do see some blank space or any other code here, delete delete delete, save the file and try the wp-admin url again. The backend of your WP application should be up and running.

If this fix doesn’t work, you will need to spend a bit more time studying the php code and troubleshooting the problem. For this, your best resource is the FAQ Troubleshooting section of WordPress.org.

Good luck!