A Bug, a Hack, or the Host? They Look Identical and Cost Differently
A blank screen tells you nothing on its own. Three very different problems produce it, and the first job is telling them apart rather than guessing.
- A bug — a plugin or theme conflict, usually right after an update. The most common by a wide margin, and the cheapest to fix.
- A hack — injected code, redirects to a site you do not recognise, or files you did not upload. Fixing the symptom leaves the way back in open, so this is a different job. Our guide on fixing a hacked WordPress website covers what it involves.
- The host — a PHP version change, an exhausted memory limit, a database that stopped responding. Nothing in WordPress will fix this, and rebuilding the site would not either.
Try This Before You Pay Us
If you can still reach wp-admin, most conflicts can be found in about ten minutes: deactivate all plugins, confirm the site returns, then switch them back on one at a time until it breaks again. The last one you enabled is your culprit. Our guide on why WordPress websites keep breaking walks through that method and the mistakes that make it inconclusive.
Come to us when you are locked out of wp-admin entirely, when the error returns after every fix, when the site is a client’s and you cannot afford to experiment, or when what you are looking at is not a bug at all.
What We Will and Will Not Promise
Diagnosis is honest work, not a guarantee. We can promise that we will tell you what is actually wrong, what it will take, and whether it is worth fixing — including when the answer is that your host has to change something, or that the plugin causing it has been abandoned and needs replacing rather than repairing.
The price and the turnaround are set out above. What a per-incident figure cannot tell you is whether you should be paying it repeatedly: if the site breaks every few weeks, each incident is a symptom rather than the problem, and the cause is usually something structural — an abandoned plugin, a PHP version the theme was never tested on, or a stack nobody has reviewed in two years. Ongoing WordPress support is the version of this that ends the cycle rather than billing it. If you would rather compare what a web maintenance company covers before deciding, that page sets out what a monthly plan includes and what it does not.