- Hey, have you ever broken your website,
and now you have a white screen of death?
I'm gonna tell you how to get it fixed.
(upbeat music)
Hey, if you've ever been working on your WordPress website,
maybe tinkering around in those PHP files,
and you made a mistake, and accidentally killed it,
and now, when you go back to look at the front side
of your website, it's the white screen of death?
Yeah, you know, it'll happen to the best of us.
I'm gonna teach you how to fix it.
Let's go.
So if you mess around with your website,
and it's supposed to look like this,
but all of a sudden, you click Save
inside of the functions file or something,
and your screen goes to this,
you know my pain right now, and you also know
that if you're trying to log back in your website
after that happens, and you go and click WP Admin,
and you're trying to get back in,
that's never gonna happen because your functions file
is extremely sensitive.
I'm pretty sure it's a woman, it's very, very sensitive,
all right, we are, and any tinkering around inside there
where you're messing around, and you accidentally forget
a comma or a semicolon, or a curly bracket
could completely jack up the whole file, all right?
So if that happens, here we go.
This is the fix.
A little intimidating, I know,
but just stay with me, and if you need to, pause this video,
walk through this.
You need to know where your website is being hosted,
because now, we can't get into the Dashboard area,
and the only means of access to this website
here on out is now FTP, so we've gotta go
in your File Manager, all right?
This particular staging site is just being hosted
temporarily along GoDaddy, so we got in here,
went to our Upload Files area, this is our File Manager.
Depending upon what sort of hosting company you're using,
this is gonna look a little different,
but ultimately, the same concept.
You should have all your folders,
and be able to drill down into the path
that I'm about to show you, okay?
So you wanna go into your website,
this our website here that we're playing around with.
We wanna open up that plus sign,
and drill down into wp-content, okay?
Open up that little plus sign,
and we wanna go into this themes area.
Now you should have a couple of themes.
I don't wanna see five or more.
That's unrealistic.
You're only ever using one, right?
Maybe a child theme sitting here,
and you wanna always have maybe one or two
as a total backup in case this does happen,
and this break takes place.
But blogoma is our active theme right now, we know that,
so this is the theme that that functions file,
that I was tinkering with is now jacked up, right?
So I need to have, I should've,
if I was smart, I would've backed up that functions file
before I started tinkering with it, right?
If you've watched my tutorials enough,
you know I tell you, backup, backup, backup.
Or if you're in my classes, we sing,
♪ Back, back, back it up ♪
All right, sorry, it's beanie today.
And it's way too early in the morning,
so blogoma, here we go.
We've gotta get into that and fix the functions file.
So I suggest going back to, if you did not save a backup,
shame on you, but if you did not, lesson learned today,
go back to your original place of purchase,
download that zipped file again, right?
Because we want that original functions file.
You're gonna get a folder,
you're gonna open it up, and you're gonna drill in,
and here we go.
Here's our functions.php.
All I need to do is drag that over,
and drop it into my, hang on a second,
I want to drag this over, we're gonna drill down
into blogoma here, open up blogoma.
Here we go.
This is the file right here that we want to overwrite,
so I'm just gonna grab this new functions,
and I'm gonna drop it in, and it is going to overwrite
my existing mistake.
No, you did not lose any of your content.
It is all still sitting here.
If you go back to the front side of your website,
it now looks like this again.
Everything's still sitting there,
so don't panic, take a deep breath, you're good.
This is the quick fix.
I hope that helps.
So again, I know that that was a lot,
and I know that you're diving into some areas
that you're probably not used to,
but just remember the basics.
Always, always, always back up your website
before you go crazy tinkering inside of your PHP files,
or just give us a call up here at WebTegrity,
and we'll help you out.
So you can either give us a shoutout on Twitter,
send us an email, or even pop over, come say hi
if you're in the San Antonio area.
If not, be sure to check out for a Meetup group
in your local city, and we'll catch you next time,
on WordPress Wednesday.
Bye-bye, y'all.
- Hey, everybody.
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