White Screen of Death after plugin update on WordPress site

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  gracewilliamsseo · Member · Jan 19, 2026 at 4:45 am

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  Hi everyone,
  After updating a plugin, my WordPress website is now showing a completely white screen on both the front end and wp-admin. I tried clearing cache and disabling plugins via FTP, but the issue still occurs. I also checked my hosting error logs and see PHP errors related to memory limits.

  Has anyone faced this issue before? What’s the best way to identify which plugin or function is causing this and fix the site without losing data?

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  james3265166 · Member · Jan 19, 2026 at 6:39 am

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  Hi there! That ‘White Screen of Death’ is terrifying, but since you already spotted memory limit errors in your logs, you are 90% of the way to the solution. The white screen usually happens because a plugin update pushed your site’s memory usage just over the edge of what your server allows. The quickest fix is to access your site via FTP, open your wp-config.php file, and add define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’); just before the line that says ‘That’s all, stop editing’. If that doesn’t bring the site back, you can force-deactivate the problematic plugin without admin access by renaming your wp-content/plugins folder to plugins_old—this should instantly let you log back in, after which you can rename the folder back and reactivate plugins one by one until the site breaks again to find the culprit. Good luck!