WordPress Tip: Site Shows Blank Page On Home Networks

This is a very common problem that people are having. I was recently asked by a friend in California that has a WordPress site on Godday hosting. This is a friend of mine for over twenty years so he had no problem giving me his WordPress or Godaddy credentials.

The problem he was experiencing was his website was working normally for other people but on his local network the pages were completely blank. Nothing would load at all. 

At first I thought this might be a security plugin that had locked him out so I tried disabling that plugin. That didn’t work so I temporarily disabled all his plugins. That also didn’t work.  In order to find out if this is the reason for the issue you should access your account via an FTP client. Once your account is opened through FTP you should navigate to the following folder:

path_to_your_application/wp-content/

Within this folder you will find the plugins/ subfolder. This subfolder contains all plugins of your application. To disable the plugins you should rename the folder. For example you can rename it from plugins/ to plugins.old/.

The next step was to look at his .htaccess files. Using Cyberduck I logged in by FTP and examined his main .htaccess file. I didn’t see any obvious problems but I backed it up and created a new one with very basic rules. 

This is the one I used because he is using a multisite installation with a subfolder.

RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ – [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

For a basic WordPress single install for a corrupt .htaccess file this is the one you should try.
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

The bad news is the new .htaccess files didn’t solve his issue. It was still a blank page for him. But the reason I included those examples above is I have solved similar problems in the past by replacing a corrupted .htaccess file so I did want to include that in this article.

The Solution

Drumroll please….The solution was something quite unexpected. Log in to your hosting control panel. Towards the bottom on Goddady you will see the black and green icon called System Processes. If you use a different host it may look different and might even have a different name.

Click on System processes and you should see the  screenshot or something similar. Make sure All Processes is highlighted. Then click End All. This is a sort of reset button.  After I clicked End All he was able to view his site again immediately.

Theme Issues

If that didn’t do the trick it might be a theme issue. If you have a blank site and can’t log in to your admin area try this.

1. Using FTP or whatever filemanagement tools your host has provided you with navigate to the wp-content/themes directory.
2. Once there locate and delete the YOUR-THEME-NAME directory. Just that one directory and nothing else.
3. Try and re-login to your WordPress dashboard.