The site is experiencing technical difficulties.

Hi @herbshirt

WordPress 5.2 introduces new protection for sites crashing due to bad or invalid code (also known as a White Screen of Death, or WSOD for short).

If your site crashes, the message above is shown, and an email is sent to the site admin with a way to log in and deactivate the plugin or theme causing problems, once that is done the site should start working again as expected.

If you are not receiving the email, try manually resetting your plugins (no Dashboard access required). If that resolves the issue, reactivate each one individually until you find the cause.

If that does not resolve the issue, access your server via SFTP or FTP, or a file manager in your hosting account’s control panel, navigate to /wp-content/themes/ and rename the directory of your currently active theme. This will force the default theme to activate and hopefully rule-out a theme-specific issue (theme functions can interfere like plugins).

Thanks Jasper, but I haven’t installed any plugins yet.

I’m actually at the initial WP-setup install stage.

The site in question is sitting in a sub-folder of another wp site – I’m wondering if there’s a conflict (although I’ve done this plenty of times before.