Wordpress Blank Pages

If you are running a Wordpress blog, you may find that at certain times, maybe when there’s a full moon, or there’s an “R” in the month, that certain admin activities lead to either a blank page or a 404 missing page error (it may also occur when users post comments). It can be a real pain in the neck. A page refresh, allowing any data to repost usually gets past the sticking point, but I’d rather not have that step. The site itself meanwhile is running fine. To be honest, I’ve no idea what the definitive answer is, but there are certain solutions you should try that may alleviate the problem:

• First, make sure you are running the very latest stable release of Wordpress and if not, then upgrade Wordpress now
• Secondly, make sure all your Plugins are up to date. Uninstall any you don’t need for a faster more secure site.
• Open the Plugin editor and double check that there are no spaces or linebreaks at the very top or the very bottom of each Plugin’s php script.
• Confirm your hosting is using the latest version of PHP. You may find you’re still on version 4, version 5 is the latest version at the time of writing. If your host offers 4 and 5, then you can add the following line to the top of your Wordpress “.htaccess” file

  AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

  . This should force the system to use PHP.

• If you don’t mind messing with MySQL or using phpMyAdmin you could try a repair on your Wordpress database (although that didn’t work for me). Or, you could “drop” any empty databases that were used by now-disabled Plugins.

Now, any one of those fixes might work, but do let me know if you have a solution of your own for the Wordpress administration blank page phenomenon or if you’ve found a workaround for sporadic admin 404 error pages.