White page of death on blog page only

[spinner]

Hi,

Pro is starting to work very well for us, but we have one last niggle:
We get the white screen of death on any page we set as the Posts page. Link in private note below

Setting Debug in WPconfig doesn’t spit out any news.

I know one of the first things you’re going to say is update, update, update, but please don’t
It’s the first thing I figured when I saw our news page was blank, and updating Pro and plugins took down the entire site - everything went white and we had to do a big db restore. A fresh one, but we have customer data on site, so it was a bit nervewracking.
I also know that turning off plugins is the second thing you’re going to say, so please don’t

As debug is not working, and I can get a posts page to work on one of WP’s native themes, my question is this:
I have checked custom CSS, and I think I have REM’ed out all the stuff that can affect.
I have read this can be a PHP error

Can you please suggest some places I should look and maybe what I should look for, and maybe even how?

thank you

[mldarshana]

Hi There @spinner

Thanks for writing in! Upon checking, I see that you’re using an older version of Pro theme. You can check the latest version information from here (https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/troubleshooting-version-compatibility/195) and update your Pro theme accordingly (https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/setup-updating-your-themes-and-plugins/62).

Please make sure to clear all caches when testing your issue again (https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-clear-your-cache-in-wordpress/).

If you’re still having issues, please provide us with your WordPress login credentials in a secure note to check your issue further.

Thanks!

[spinner]

I am sorry - I think I explained to you WHY I was not going to update, I think the line was "I know one of the first things you’re going to say is update, update, update, but please don’t"
I am not sure how much better I can explain that after we updated, the site went white. When we rolled back, only the news page was white.
This indicates there is an issue that actually may not be solved by updating.

Thank you so much for your valuable insights.

[spinner]

We have located the issue to something going on with the child theme. It works on the main theme.
We are not updating until we have pinpointed the issue - I will update with our findings, maybe it will help some others.

[thai]

Glad you’ve sorted it out

About keeping your theme up-to-date, you should take a look at this:

How to update WordPress Theme the easiest way [2019 TUTORIAL]

Regards!

[spinner]

I am all for updating.
I am all for updating whenever I can
However this is for a client who got a nasty scare yesterday when we did a careful and incremental upgrade, and we had to restore the DB to get the site working again, so my client has nixed updating until the end of tradeshow season.
Which I understand.
We wanted to update before we rolled out the new layout and visuals.

I am currently working on our Dev site - I upgraded Pro there as well. Less of a disaster but I see a few pages connected to WooCommerce showing the White Screen of Death, so I am hopefully getting closer to what the issue is and will be able to solve it.

It’s most definitely not caching, our dev pages have no caching.

[Prasant]

Hello @spinner,

Thanks for updating the thread.

First up I am sorry for the confusion in earlier part of the thread. You mentioned that if parent theme is activated blog page is working fine. In that regards there’s some customization done in child theme that’s causing the issue. Regarding WooCommerce, just to narrow down if the problem is coming from child theme, please activate parent theme and see if the problem persist. If it’s resolved then I suggest you take a more closer look at the customizations in child theme.

Thanks.

[spinner]

Thank you, we are going over the chlld theme and woo with a fine tooth comb.

[ruenel]

Hey @spinner,

A white screen could mean that there is a fatal error. Could you please enable the debug mode? You can do this by opening wp-config.php and adding

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

When you revisit the blog page, you should have some error output describing the issue in more detail.

Please let us know how it goes.

[spinner]

As mentioned in the first post, we tried debug mode on the site when everything went to white. Also - we have debug in our wp-config, we turn false to true on and off. We had Debug/Display to true when we checked the white blog page and no error manifested. I have taken News off the site for now, and am using Recent Posts on the new frontpage I am setting up. Here’s what we have in our config

define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_LOG’, true );
define( ‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, false);

The closest I got was code 284, which points to a plugin, which is why we are going over everything WooCommerce. Once Woo is cleared, we will go over the Woo add-ons, once they are cleared, we are going over WP Forms, Yoast, etc.

[nabeel]

Hey @spinner,

You can simply deactivate all third party plugins, and see if the problem remains. If it’s fixed, you’ll know a plugin caused the problem, and you can narrow down which one by reactivating them one at a time.

Let us know how it goes!

[spinner]

We did - and now we are narrowing it down - as we have several Woo add-ons, we are talking to Woo already.
However - we also need to make sure this does not happen again when we update the Live site, which is why we are taking it slow, and also testing it on the dev site - where it won’t work either, but we get more white pages there, so, we’re working on figuring it out.

I’ll keep you posted!

[jade]

Hi @spinner,

In case you get a whiite screen when accessing the site after updating, you can enable the wp_debug option of the wp-config.php file so that it will display the error info and will give you an idea what is causing the issue.

Let us know how it goes.

[spinner]

Hi,
Please see my previous posts, thank you

[paul.r]

You’re welcome! Please let us know how it goes.