In this video I’ll show you how to fix an odd phenomenon I’d like to call “The Occasional White Screen of Death”. Here’s what happened:
Google have notified me that some of my posts were not showing up, even though most of them are working fine. This didn’t make much sense, because traditionally, “white screen of death” in WordPress means either a site works fine, or a site has an issue. But only some posts having issues was a new one to me.
So I made tweaks, investigated the whole stack and checked if I could increase some value or other – to no avail. In the end I tried making sense of what all these posts had in common, but again there was nothing I could spot.
But I’ve noticed that none of them had the MORE tag applied. Turns out that adding the magic MORE tag to a post avoids these occasional white screen of death issues. Who knew? Granted, I still don’t know what exactly is causing the issue, but this tweak certainly fixes things.
Usually I only set the MORE tag on longer posts, but perhaps it’s a good idea to get into the habit of setting one even with shorter posts. As long as it’s in there somewhere, all posts were loading fine.