I'm getting a blank screen on the Shield's admin page

When you're going to the Shield's admin page, it may happen that you just get a blank screen. 

Example of the Scans page

When you load Scans page, you might get a blank screen:

Also when trying to run a scan, the scan trying to run for a while then the blank page appears.

What to do when you are you getting a blank screen on the Shield's admin page

The first thing to do is to ensure that you've upgraded to the latest version of Shield.

If this problem still persists, please read on...

The problem here is that many of Shield's plugin pages are loaded over AJAX. This speeds up the page loading as it only requests data from WordPress that is necessary.

However, if you have a plugin or theme or anything else that is generating an error or outputting text, it'll often break the AJAX processing because there's spurious text getting in the way of processing the data. It may even be a Shield error of some sort, there's no way to know until we review the requests.

If you load the problem page, for example Scan Results page, and then open up your browser console (usually pressing F12), and then:

  1. Click on the 'Network' tab
  2. Click on XHR (or AJAX)
  3. Reload your page (F5)

  4. You'll see things loading like in this screenshot:


First of all, you'll want the status to be 200. If you're not getting that, there's a more serious issue going on and you may have to investigate your server's PHP error logs to look for fatal errors.

Assuming you get 200, click on one of the lines, usually the first one.

The critical piece is the "Response" section which should start with the character "{". If it doesn't, it'll probably be some text output from somewhere.

You can have a go at doing that.

Failing this, it's going to require that you deactivate each plugin on your site, one-at-a-time to find out which one is outputting text. Or if you're not getting Status 200, finding out what the error is from your server's PHP error logs.