White Screen of Death

Looks like the Generate Critical CSS wiped out my site.

Yeah, this was obviously a big mistake.

Wow, this is a disaster. Instead of speeding up my site, it’s wiped it out.

Though I don’t understand it, the plugin only affected the current theme. And since the current theme was a child theme, deleting the child theme solved the problem.

Hi Bob,

I regret to hear about your experience.

I do not believe the Above The Fold Optimization plugin can be the cause.

The plugin does not modify files and does not touch the theme directory. In fact, the goal of the plugin is to influence as little as possible to be usable next to other optimization plugins.

Did you manage to resolve the problem?

Best Regards,
Jan Jaap

I’m quite sure it was using the Generate Critical CSS that did the damage. If you don’t believe it was your plugin, perhaps you’re right, but I was able to recreated the problem on a beta site. I was able to fix it by deleting the Child Theme and your plugin.

My first impression is that the problem may have been caused by a server overload after starting PhantomJS via the “Generate Critical CSS”-button.

I hope you have found a different solution to achieve the desired Above the fold optimization. If not: the plugin Autoptimize offers an inline CSS field. You could use it together with the online Above the fold generator based on Penthouse.js or by generating Critical Path CSS manually via Grunt.js.

https://jonassebastianohlsson.com/criticalpathcssgenerator/

https://gruntjs.com/
https://github.com/pocketjoso/penthouse

I got this problem.

I could only fix the problem by changing

$parsed = [];
to
$parsed = '[]';

in the “Print CSS for extraction by Critical CSS generator” in optimization.class.php

I’m not sure if this was because my setup is different, but my fix worked for me ??

Is this the bug fixed in 2.2.1??

Hi Alan!

Yes, the bug has been fixed in the latest releases.

Best Regards,
Jan Jaap