I was editing a theme and then my WordPress pages went blank. The WP-Admin page is only a blank page. I can’t access the WordPress backend. I can’t login to my WordPress site. Did I corrupt my theme? Did I delete my WordPress site? How do I get my WordPress site back? Did I screw up my WordPress database? This has happened before to someone else, right?

Well, it has happened to someone else. It is a bit scary at first … but, don’t worry. It is fairly easy to get your pages back. You don’t even have to mess with phpMyAdmin or mySQL. Here is what you do.

If you are using Dreamweaver, or other similar IDE, you can open your site and look at the files on your remote server. If you have access to your remote server from a web control panel, or otherwise, the same solution will work. Locate the theme that you were working on when the pages went blank and you lost access to the WordPress backend and login page. If you don’t have a copy of the remote files on your local machine, you may want to download the theme files as a backup. Most likely you already have the copy you uploaded to your site. Then, you can try deleting the functions.php page for the theme. That could very well give you back your WordPress site. It won’t fix the theme you were using, but you can switch to a different theme while you figure out what is wrong. If deleting the functions.php file does not do the trick, then simply delete the entire theme from your remote server. You can find the theme in wp-content->themes->theme-that-caused-the-problem.

I stumbled upon this problem myself when I was trying to create a theme that obviously had a problem in my code somewhere. Removing the functions.php file was all that was necessary for me to be able to access my WP backend and change the theme; as an interim fix, while I attempted to locate the problem in my code.

I hope this helps someone else save some time and worry.

If you found this helpful, let me know.