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Now this is something that I’ve seen a time or to and even my Guest Bloggers here on Blazing Minds have had the problem with the dreaded WordPress white screen of death when they have tried to get on to the dashboard to add a guest post.
But is there a way to solve the problem?
The simple answer to that is YES!
There can be many things that cause this to happen, it could be plugins needing an update after you have upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.
It can even be a simple matter of memory on your server and 9 times out of 10 this is the main cause of the problem.
Most of the time a user will either get the dread WordPress white screen of death or they will get the dashboard appear with an error showing:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2323020 bytes) in /wp-includes/class-simplepie.php
But don’t worry there is away around this and it’s really easy to do.
How to fix the memory problem with WordPress
- You will need to edit the wp-config.php file in your WordPress installation, so load it in to a text editor.
- The first line should be <?php after this line add
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
This will give your WordPress installation a little more head room than its default setting, so you are doubling the amount. - Save the updated wp-config.php back to your server and hey presto, your guest bloggers should be back to posting.
This also goes the same if you yourself are having problems with your own Admin Dashboard on WordPress.
What could be causing the problem in the first place?
Usually, this is all caused by memory hungry plugins and those that may need updating to be less hungry with your installation, one which I found to be a terrible culprit of this was Capability Manager a plugin which a few WordPress users use when they would like to give a little friendly usage to their guest poster.
I personally found that after disabling this plugin, everything worked and after adding the code above and then re-enabling the plugin, everything seemed fine again.
But, then another problem arose, I could log in, I could even login with another “dummy” user account but sadly @DrRus couldn’t, so after plenty of deliberation and playing around with plugins etc, I narrowed the offending plugin, Lightbox 2, yes it looks nice but it was even causing a Java script error on IE8 and occasionally on FireFox as well. Suffice to say this was removed!!
So if you are having these problems with your WordPress installation, then don’t just sit there in silence, give any of the above a try, and hopefully it will work for you as well 
But remember, check your plugins first as one of these, specially ones that have not been updated for use with the latest version of WordPress could be causing annoying problems.
Note: A Big special thanks to @DrRus for helping me out with logging in on the other side of the world on different browsers and checking if he could log in and working with me to solve the issues and to @BodynSoil for checking on her side if she had problems, many thanks to you both
Related articles
- WordPress.com is Still The Bomb! (basicblogtips.com)
- How to use WordPress.com Features in Self Hosted Blogs (famousbloggers.net)
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Hey Karen!
Glad to help out with the “White Screen” on WP! LOL! Of course I did miss my nap yesterday as we tried to figure out what was going on. But all in all, glad to help and so glad we did figure out the “battle of the plug ins”.
Dr. Rus
Hey Rus, I honestly don’t think I would have been able to sort it out without you, you were there when I needed a tester that responds
Great to see that you got the problem sorted out in the end, is it me or does the blog now have a little extra speed to it?
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I think it has helped with a little extra speed
Karen recently blogged..A New Look For Klout And A Chrome Extension for Klout And Twitter
Yes, I agree, the blog does seem a little more speedy now too. I need to go look over all the plug ins I have and see what might need to go.
I can honestly say I have never had the misfortune of being confronted with the ‘dreaded WordPress white screen of death.’ Thanks for the useful tips for fixing the problem, should it ever happen to me!
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You’re quite lucky, fingers crossed that you don’t get it
I was at lunch when I got the call to action, unfortunately I was in the middle of a system maintenance reboot. As most of you know, time stands still when you are waiting for a restart to happen. Glad to be able to help trouble shoot for you, what little assistance I gave at least.
Great post, the white screen of death sounds dreadful, thankfully I haven’t encountered it yet but know have a “go to” resource for when, and if, I ever do.
Thank you for the help you gave, it was much appreciated, fingers crossed you never get the white screen
I have seen similar issues with file uploads and limits constraining Live Writer from reading posts. Be wary of memory usage though on shared hosting, if your blog consumes too much RAM the hosting provider may automatically kill the process making your blog have an outage until it restarts. Shared hosting is very tight on not letting individual sites hog too much RAM, if you get 128mb your lucky that is usually the upper limit.
Thanks for the advice Justin, I still in the learning curve for WordPress
Don’t spam me for a quickie comment, all I have to say it FINALLY! Thank you!!!
This is immediately being emailed to my designer.
As new on WP I haven’t had this problem and hope not having it also
Thanks Rus and Karen!
But I’ll have it well bookmarked just in case
Cheers,
Gera
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Thanks Gera, as I’ve said to other commentators, hopefully you won’t get it
I had this problem about a year ago, and solved it using the method you described. I haven’t really looked into which plugin was causing the issue, mainly because it will probably be the one I want installed the most.
I do try to keep my plugin count down, but there are so many useful plugins that it seems impossible for me to not run into this error.
Paul Salmon recently blogged..Getting Started with Social Networks and Social Media
I haven’t encountered this problem when logging to the dashboard, but sometimes I do get a similar error after commenting on some blogs which could be another reason altogether. If WP gives a memory error it usually is something to do with a plug in. After reading the comments it seems your website got a speed boost after the change, so will definitely will give this a try. Another thing I’m a bit concerned is will this get me in trouble with the hosting provider ? or is it totally unrelated to the hosting.
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All servers won’t allow to upgrade memory allocation but we always can keep an eye on the plugins and remove some which are not most essential. Glad Karen you’ve sorted it out and stored one more experience and strength.
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I knew since reading the first sentence that Karen already knows how to solve the problem
Seeing how many problems you solved I think you should be working as a software tester or something 
I’ve never encountered this problem but I’m definitely making a note of it… I actually don’t do a whole lot of guest blogging myself, although it’s something I’ve considered getting into.
wordpress can be a fickle platform but I love it anyway!
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