I recently did some tweaking to my themes functions.php file and upgraded WordPress on my hosting. The upgrade went well, but I have a problem when I try to login to the control panel of my blog. When I load wp-login.php and I insert my username and the password, the only thing I get is a Blank Page. No error messages, only a Blank Page. It happens with Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc.

I searched several websites and found the solution, so now I’ll share it with you. From what I read, this is a common problem many wordpress users face.

Blank Pages

Blank pages are usually php errors, so look at your error logs to see why it’s crashing. Where can you see your error logs?  You can access your error logs via ftp or at your host control center you need to look at the logs to see why php is crashing. I didn’t see any errors in my log, so I followed this suggestion:

“I was having a similar problem with my site. I searched high and low and followed all the recommendations (disabled plugins, checked wp-config.php, checked for trailing blank line in wp-login/wp-admin php files, etc). It wasn’t until I went into my DB and reverted to the default theme that I started taking a hard look at the theme I was running (boldlines). I noticed there was a blank line at the end of the theme’s functions.php. I removed the blank line and everything started to work just fine.”

I re-uploaded my current themes original functions.php file and that fixed my issue, everything works correctly and I was able to login to the admin area. It appears that when I was doing some tweaking to my functions.php file I left an extra space in it, I never would have thought an extra space would cause such a serious problem.

Just in case this solution doesn’t work for you, here are some other possible solutions to your wordpress login.php blank page issue:

1. having multiple php lines like this: <?php  ?> will also make the wp-admin crash.
2. If its a plugin that crashed, try renaming your plugins folder, and it will work. You’ll have to reinstall each plugin 1 at a time until you can locate the plugin that caused the crash.

One of these three solutions should work for solving your blank page issue, if not I suggest searching for a solution on wordpress.org.

If you know of any other solutions, leave your comment below.

Be sure to check out some of my other great wordpress articles on my home business and plr membership website MakeCashNow.biz.

Rate This Article:  Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

Wordpress at times can do things that are both bothersome and annoying. This article is for you to post questions and answers, and any tips and tricks you have for wordpress. In a couple of months I will take this post and create some new wordpress tutorials covering all the tips, tricks, and questions raised in this post.

To start things off, here is a trick I learned to solve on of my problems:

WordPress Visual Editor Strips Out Html Line Break and Paragraph Tags

As a default wordpress only lets you have line spacing and paragraph spacing for one line, but what if you want say 3, 4, 5 or more lines of space? WordPress as a default strips out every instance of <br> and <p> tags you add in html. So what can you do?

To achieve the spacing look you want you need to use the tag below in html.

<br class="blank"/>

Use the line everywhere you want a space, if you need 4 lines of space you will need to add the tag 4 times.

More WordPress Tips and Tricks

Have a good tip or trick you used to solve a minor issue on your site? Leave it below in the comments section.

Rate This Article:  Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

A few weeks ago I wrote on how to optimize your WordPress site for better performance which has some tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site. I received a few requests to elaborate on some of the points as not all of them are obvious changes. In this article I have explained how you can add far future expiry header to your image, css and javascript files to speed up your site.

Adding expires headers do not affect the site load time for a first time visitor but you will be surprised how much the page load time decreases (faster page load) for subsequent page views/return visits from that visitor. Expires header specifies a time far enough in the future so that browsers won’t try to re-fetch images, CSS, javascript etc files that haven’t changed (this reduces the number of HTTP requests) and hence the performance improvement on subsequent page views.

If your server is Apache (most web servers), you can use the ‘ExpiresDefault’ directive to set an expiration date relative to the current date.

This sets the expiry date of the file 2 months into the future from the current time. The following values can be used to specify the time period:

• years
• months
• weeks
• days
• hours
• minutes
• seconds

eg. ExpiresDefault “access plus 14 days”

To add expires header to the image, CSS, javascript files add the following to your .htaccess file

or

A2592000 means 1 month in the future (60*60*24*30=2592000)

Keep in mind that when you use expires header the files are cached in the browser until it expires so do not use this on files that changes frequently. If you change/update a file that has a far future expiry (eg. CSS or javascript files) then you should rename that file and use the renamed version so the browser doesn’t fetch the old file.

Removing ETags

According to Wikipedia – “An ETag (entity tag) is an HTTP response header returned by an HTTP/1.1 compliant web server used to determine change in content at a given URL. When a new HTTP response contains the same ETag as an older HTTP response, the contents are considered to be the same without further downloading.”

ETags were added to provide a mechanism for validating entities that is more flexible than the last-modified date but If you’re not taking advantage of the flexible validation model that ETags provide, it’s better to just remove the ETag altogether. Removing the ETag reduces the size of the HTTP headers in the response and subsequent requests thus improving site performance.

Add the following to your .htaccess file to remove ETags:

These tweaks can dramatically improve the performance of your site even though they are minor and doesn’t take that long to apply. I have seen a 20% speed improvement on my page loads just by adding these tweaks. My home page used to take around 5 seconds to load but then it dropped to around 3 seconds after these tweaks. Below is a screenshot of YSlow:

Similar posts that you may like

• How to Add Widgets to WordPress Theme’s Footer
• WordPress Optimization Tips and Tricks for Better Performance and Speed
• What Would You Do If Somehow You Lost all Your Blog’s Content?
• Top 15 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) mistakes I commonly make
• How to Install WordPress on Your Blog (Instructions with Screenshots)

Rate This Article:  Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.

Anyway, The transfer was smooth but I had a slight issue that I noticed after the transfer. There were special characters (eg. �, �~, ’) scattered throughout my blog posts. I was pretty sure that this was a character encoding mismatch problem. I got a little scared thinking it would take a long time to fix but then I found a really easy way to solve it.

Fixing the Character Encoding Mismatch Problem in WordPress

• Open the ‘wp-config.php’ file in a text editor such as notepad (the wp-config.php file can be found on the directory where you installed WordPress).
• Find the following two lines and comment them out:

They should look like the following after you comment them out:

• Now upload the updated ‘wp-config.php’ file to your webhost.

This character encoding problem can happen after a database upgrade too so it doesn’t hurt to keep this trick in your mind just in case.

Rate This Article:  Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.