You may have heard of the “white screen of death” with WordPress sites.  This article may help resolve that issue, especially if it’s a plugin causing the issue.

I ran into the issue recently where I needed to update a client website and when I logged into wp-admin, the sidebar was there, but the content / middle section was blank.  I could go to any menu option and I’d see a flash of text and then it would be blank.  I tried looking through the code to see if there was a <div> on top covering the content for some reason – but what I found out was the content (and whatever text I saw for a split second) was gone, so the blank screen was just that…blank, not hidden by a rogue HTML element.

I figured a plugin must be causing this.  After I updated the WordPress core files via SSH and it still didn’t work, I needed to find a solution for this!  But how could I deactivate all of the plugins to figure out which one was causing the issue if I couldn’t get to that page?

In phpMyAdmin, I ran this command to disable all plugins:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = '' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

Then, I could see inside the admin, great!  Then I updated all the plugins and reactivated all of them.  It seems like a plugin was out of date, causing the issue.

If you have the “white screen of death” or this “gray screen of death” like I had, try disabling all of the plugins with the command above and hopefully that works for you!