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Insufficient memory limit will cause Wordpress common admin blank screen problem.

“Code is Poetry” is the famous claim at the bottom of each page of the Wordpress Codex. Taking to this words, users named a common problem of this blogscript as The Blank Screen of Death, describing pretty picturally the situation when after login into the admin-area just a blank page appears. Locking out from the backend of your blog without any error message will of course leave you helpless.

When you search the web for “wordpress admin blank” thousands of sites indicates a few dozend reasons for this problem. Well, here’s another one: the memory limit of your server is too low.

As any script Wordpress needs a memory space in its servers environment for execution, and Wordpress is really hungry! In the Codex you will find specifications of 10M for a naked Wordpress installation, and when you use plugins – and who does not – this value will increase with every single one. But memory for script execution is always limited at any server, and when a script exceeds this limit, it just stops running.

This problem is relevant specially when you not use your own server but shared hosting. Then a typical value for the memory limit is 16M – really not much higher as the minimum Wordpress requires.  If this is the case, you are really in danger to suffer from The Blank Page of Death!

Diagnostics

There are a few signs indicating that your blank screen problem is caused by insufficient memory limit:

• after login the dashboard appears succesfully, but when you change to another admin area like pages or settings, there is only a blank page
• everythings seemes to be ok, but when you try to update a post, the script runs and runs and runs but never save your changes
• sometimes you can login and the dashboard appears, sometimes there is only a blank screen
• you just activated an additional plugin and all the blank screen problems are occuring
• not only your backend is affected, also the frontend will appear only sometimes and anothertime only shows the blank screen
• so the whole behaviour of your blog seemes to be unpredictable: sometimes its there, sometimes not

Before you start a big debugging session of your whole installation now,  just look for the value of the memory limit of your server. You can ask your hoster or take a look into the specifications of your hosting package. But the fastes and easiest way is still to run this little script:

<?PHP
phpinfo ();
?>

Copy this few lines into a plain text editor, save it as phpinfo.php and upload it via ftp in your domains root directory. Open your browser and run the script by typing “yourdomain/phpinfo.php” into the adress bar.

The result will be a huge table with all the information about your current server environment. Search within the page for “memory_limit” and you will find the value. Is it 16M you are probably lucky, cause you very likely identified the reason for your problem!

Therapy

You may think increasing memory limit will now easily solve your problems. Unfortunately in most cases this will not be possible for shared hosting. When you just pay a few Euros per year for your webserver, you can’t really expect to get more server ressources for your money as specified in your contract.  Trying to increase memory limit by altering Wordpress config-files like described e.g. here, will also not succeed.  Hosters are well defended against such simple manipulations.

The only way is to reduce the memory-hunger of your Wordpress installation. So try the following:

• Think about your plugins. Deactivate Plugins wich are just “nice to have”.
  Important: also remove all deactivated plugins from your plugins-directory, because while running the admin-area all present plugins are checked permanently! This is also the way to deactivate plugins when you can’t access the admin-area.
• Use english as language for your admin area. Every other language needs the implementation of the specific librairy and highly increases the memory needed by Wordpress. Take a look in your wp-config.php. Find the line like
  define (’WPLANG’, ‘de_DE’);
  change it to
  // define (’WPLANG’, ‘de_DE’);
  This line implements the specified languagepack into your installation. When just deactivated, no languagepack is active and the language will be english.
• Alternatively you can try this patch to reduce memory-hunger of integrated languagepacks.

I hope this therapy will bring your admin-area back to life! If not, there are still a lot more possible reasons for The Blank Screen of Death – and this in my opinion is not the very best certificate for the quality of the Wordpress code itself.