Earlier this week, I wanted to start posting again on my website, AndySylvester.com. When I went to log in, all I saw was a white screen. After some searching, I found that this was a thing for WordPress sites (“white screen of death”). Ugh – just what I needed! I found a few articles (https://themeisle.com/blog/cant-access-wp-admin/, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-wordpress-white-screen-of-death, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-locked-out-of-wordpress-admin-issue)

and did the following steps:

• Added a line in wp-config.php to increase memory to 64 MB
• Checked my WordPress core files (they were up to date)
• Renamed my plugin and themes directories
• Added a DEBUG MODE statement to wp-config.php

At this point, I was able to see some error messages:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/andy_site_user/apps/andy_sylvester_site/wp-config.php:1) in /home/andy_site_user/apps/andy_sylvester_site/wp-login.php on line 462

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/andy_site_user/apps/andy_sylvester_site/wp-config.php:1) in /home/andy_site_user/apps/andy_sylvester_site/wp-login.php on line 478

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/andy_site_user/apps/andy_sylvester_site/wp-config.php:1) in /home/andy_site_user/apps/andy_sylvester_site/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6828

However, I still could not log in. I spent some time with Bluehost tech support (both chat and phone support), but did not get much help there. As part of their troubleshooting, I turned SSL support on and off (that had a side effect, will discuss later in this post).

Per this post, I removed the closing PHP tag in wp-config.php.

Per this Stack Exchange post (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42832860/wordpress-utf-8-without-bom), I resaved wp-config.php and wp-login.php to force UTF-8 encoding without BOM. At that point, the error messages were removed, and the login fields remained, but now I was getting messages related to cookies, and saw some redirection in the URL field in the browser. Read through these articles (https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/215032/cookie-domain-setting-confusion, https://wp-staging.com/how-to-fix-the-error-cookies-are-blocked-or-not-supported-by-your-browser/).

I tried to get Bluehost to turn off SSL for my site (although I already de-selected that). They said they turned it off, but subdomains on andysylvester.com still showed up as secure sites, which messed up some of the display (had links to http which were interpreted as “unsecure” – arrrgh!).

I decided to change the URL of my site in the MySQL database from https://andysylvester.com to https://andysylvester.com.

Also, per this post (https://themeisle.com/blog/add-wordpress-https/) , I added the following line to wp-config.php:

define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);

After I did this, I was FINALLY able to log into my site – whew!

I do not know how this whole thing started, but I am glad to get back to posting!