Blank home page

For the past 6-8 weeks I’ve been encountering a problem where the home page of the site shows up blank, but if you navigate to any other URL they load.

I’ve searched for other people who’ve had this problem and tried the usual fixes: switch to the default theme (makes no difference) and deactivate plug-ins.

I thought I’d isolated the plug-in that was causing the problem and got the home page loading again…until a few weeks later, when the problem reoccurred. I had to go through my list of plug-ins again, deactivate the new culprit, and then on a whim I reactivated what I thought had caused the problem the first time. This time, with that activated the page loaded.

For example, when I installed EWWW Image Optimizer about a month ago, I had to use it, then deactivate it when I was done or I got the blank page. Now I’m finding that I can have that activated but have had to turn off a plug-in which I’ve had running for years with no problem, and which hasn’t updated in the interim.

This is now a regular occurrence. I never know from one week to the next which plug-in I’m going to have turn off. I’m obviously worried that at some point it’s going to be something vital like Woocommerce.

I’ve tested in Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari (plus on my phone) and all of them show me a blank page. Console just says “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error)”.

Does anybody have any ideas?