blank page / error 500

It might happen that you upload Sitecake to your website folder, visit domain.com/sitecake.php, and see a blank screen or Error 500. This checklist covers the most common causes, from obvious to obscure.

1. Do you have an index page?

Sitecake needs a starting point — either index.html or index.php must exist in the same folder.

2. Is your HTML valid?

Sitecake requires properly closed HTML tags. Validate your HTML with the W3C Validator or the Validity Chrome plugin.

3. Did you upload all files?

Sometimes FTP fails to upload all files. The safest approach is to upload the ZIP and extract it on the server using cPanel File Manager.

4. Is your server configuration ok?

Visit domain.com/sitecake/<version>/config/requirements.php (replace <version> with your installed Sitecake version, e.g. 4.0.19 — check the sitecake/ folder name if you're not sure). You should see:

“Basic server configuration needed for Sitecake to run is OK”

If you get an error instead, fix it and check again until everything is green.

5. Too many PHP files or libraries?

Sitecake is a simple CMS for simple websites. If you have many PHP files in the site root, use a .scignore file to exclude files and folders from processing.

6. Too many large images?

Large images straight from a camera can cause PHP max execution time issues. Optimize images with a service like TinyPNG. Avoid having hundreds of images on a single page.

7. Don’t mix WordPress and Sitecake

Managing a website with two CMSs at the same time is unsupported. If you keep WordPress in a separate blog/ folder, use .scignore to exclude it. Read more here.

8. Only one website per root folder

If you have multiple websites in the same root, Sitecake will try to manage them all and likely fail. Remove anything that isn’t part of the site you want to manage.

9. Permissions issue

Sitecake needs read, write, and execute permissions. Generally 644 for files and 755 for folders works out of the box.

10. Check the log file

Sitecake logs errors in cms-temp/logs/sitecake.log. Common errors found there:

Maximum execution time exceeded — This can happen if there are too many files, images are too large, there are too many sc-content zones on a page, or the server is slow. Increase the maximum execution time or reduce the load.

Allowed memory size exhausted — Same causes as above. Increase memory limit or reduce load.

Open_basedir restriction in effect — Try a different session handler. Set session.save_handler in config.php and leave it as files, then set save_path to a writable directory.