WORDPRESS RELIABILITY GLOSSARY
White Screen of Death (WSOD)
A blank screen served with an HTTP 500 status when error reporting is suppressed.
Plain-English Explanation
When your website turns completely blank and white with no text, error message, or explanation.
Systems Engineering Definition
A fatal PHP runtime failure occurring while display_errors is set to 0 and error logging is either suppressed or routing to an unreachable destination, returning an empty response body with HTTP 500.
Common Root Causes
- •Theme functions.php syntax error or trailing whitespace before opening PHP tag
- •Plugin memory exhaustion during database initialization
- •Corrupted database connection credentials in wp-config.php
Autvy Automated Remediation
Autvy catches shutdown events at the process layer, bypassing WordPress template rendering entirely to trap the error and roll back within seconds.
Related Terms
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