You upload a few hundred files, refresh your site and see nothing. No error, no message, just a blank white page. Welcome to the White Screen of Death, which WordPress shows when PHP hits a fatal error and has been told to keep quiet about it.

After a transfer, the usual causes are boring. A plugin or theme file was only partly uploaded because the connection dropped. A file arrived corrupted, perhaps in the wrong transfer mode. The new host runs a different PHP version, and an older plugin objects. Or wp-config.php has a stray character in it.

Start by turning on debugging. In wp-config.php, set WP_DEBUG to true and look at the error log. The message will name the file and the line, which is much more helpful than a blank page.

Then check the basics. Compare file sizes and hashes between your computer and the server. Rename the plugins folder to switch every plugin off at once. If the site returns, switch them back on one at a time.

Remember to turn debugging off afterwards. Visitors do not need to read your error messages.

Credit: Thank you to Claude for writing this filler content. It is an unsupervised learning task.