When Your Wordpress Blog Goes Blank – Possible Fix

One of the many services I offer is migrating Wordpress blogs from one host to another. If you’re attempting to migrate your own blog, here’s one important tip: deactivate your caching plugin before you migrate (usually wp-cache or wp-super-cache).

You don’t have to deactivate any other plugins, if you’re migrating your entire database then it’ll automatically reactivate what you were using before. But caching plugins do not play well with blog moves.

If, once you’ve moved the site, all you see is a blank page—not an error page, your site is just a blank page with nothing on it—then check your wp-config file for the following line or something like it:

define('WP_CACHE', true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager

You can either disable the line by putting a “#” in front of it like so:

#define('WP_CACHE', true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager

or you can delete the entire line and trust the caching program to add it back in once you reactivate.

I encountered this issue on Media Temple. I don’t know if that’s because MT is a bit different or if I’ve always turned off the caching plugin before. It was quite easy to fix, but a real pain to catch.

So if your Wordpress blog is showing nothing but blank pages check your wp-config file–it may be an easier fix than you expected. (Also, check to make sure your new host doesn’t have an index.html file in your blog’s main directory. All you want is index.php and index.php.wpau.bak, index.html will keep the front page of your blog from showing up).

Tagged as: fix wordpress, move wordpress, wordpress blank, wordpress cache

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Written by Ms. Crafty

Ms. Crafty enjoys long walks on the beach mountains, Wordpress, clean code, and (some days) Thesis. Her specialties include theme customization and blog migration. She also loves to write about ways to make your site better.