Why does a built React application output a white screen when opened in a browser?

The appearance of an empty white screen after building a single-page React application is most often associated with incorrectly specified paths to static files in the project configuration. When the application is built for production, it defaults to expecting that it will be launched from the root directory of the web server, and if you place it in a subfolder, the paths to scripts and styles in the HTML file turn out to be incorrect.

To fix this problem, open the configuration file of your bundler or package.json and add a base path parameter that matches your final URL address. After that, rebuild the project so that all internal resource links are formed considering the new catalog prefix.

Another common cause of a white screen is critical errors in the code during application initialization that were not caught and caused the entire component tree to crash. You can open the developer console in the browser to see the specific JavaScript error message. Using global error handling components will help catch such failures in time and display a user-friendly message instead of an empty screen.