One Cause of the WordPress White Screen of Death During New Installations

If you’ve installed a bunch of WordPress installs on various hosting services over the years, you’ve probably run into the “white screen of death” during the installation process. I’m not sure how common this is any more, but in my 15+ years of developing WordPress websites, I’ve run into the problem several times. There is plenty of documentation out there about common causes, but I recently ran into something more unusual.

If you are installing a new WordPress site and get the “WSOD” issue and the usual recovery methods don’t work, find out if WordPress has just released a new update. I was installing some new WordPress installs on one of the major hosting services the same day that WordPress released a monthly upgrade. I suspect that the hosting service pushed out a software update at the time my install process was running, causing a corrupted on incomplete installation.

The solution if this is happening is just to re-install WordPress.