As a WordPress teacher and mentor to my Website Creation Workshop students I’ve seen almost every problem or issue you can think of For over 10 years, I’ve worked on troubleshooting countless number of websites from broken plugins to blank screens to all sorts of error messages. (Note: this article is for people who already have a WordPress website. If you are new to WordPress, go here to get notified for my next foundation workshop.)
There are variety of possible causes for website issues, but from my experience, more than half of these issues are caused by “plugin problems.” And today I have a fun and easy solution for you!
First: What is a “Plugin Conflict”?
As you probably know, a plugin lets you add a new functionality to your WordPress site. Thanks to plugins, you can turn your WordPress site into a powerful tool to do so many things without having to know website codes and scripts.
While plugins might look simple to us users, they are actually made up of complex scripts that are working hard in the background. And sometimes, one plugin might not work well with another plugin. Or a plugin can sometimes cause issues when used with a particular theme. Similar issues can happen between a plugin and a version of WordPress also.
When a plugin doesn’t play nicely with other plugins, or a theme, or a WordPress version, it’s called “plugin conflict.”
The Hard Way to Identify Plugin Problems…
When a plugin conflict happens, the issue normally goes away when you deactivate the culprit plugin. Typically, what you need to do is to go to “Plugins” in your WordPress admin panel, deactivate all of your plugins, and see if the issue goes away. If it does, start reactivating your plugins, one at a time, to find out which plugin triggers the issue.
This method normally takes some time and patience as a typical WordPress site is running quite a few plugins.
The EASY Way to Identify Plugin Problems!
I recently discovered a very cool plugin that makes it so much quicker, easier, and even FUN to go through this process. Meet “Plugin Detective”!
Introducing: Plugin Detective – Troubleshooting by NSquared
Finally! This plugin will do all the heavy lifting for you to identify which plugin is giving you a headache. It uses a simple but very effective process to narrow down a culprit plugin for you.
In fact, finding a problem plugin is no longer something I dread, thanks to this super user-friendly plugin. Just watch this video to see what I mean:
Watch this Short Video that Shows You How it Works:
Just go here to check it out: https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-detective/
This plugin is such a lifesaver… I highly recommend it!
Watch the video and let me know what you think in the comments below
Thanks Christina, this was a very helpful tip. It is often small malfunctions of a site that can discourage you to move on and if you don’t have a go-to tech person it is easy to give up. This tool will help you in a fun and easy way to solve a lot of those seemingly un-fixable problems and it will probably make you feel like a tech wiz kid as well! 🙂
Yes! It’s fun to use and even the WordPress experts use it!
This is a priceless plugin to know about, especially for those of us who are not techies. Thanks!
Lynne,
Yes this plugin is so much fun to use! You can keep it in your site and activated all the time, so that if you need to troubleshoot, it’s already there.
Thank you so much for this Christina! So good to have this tool in case I need it! I recommend your Website Creation Workshop all the time! I love being able to manage my site myself. You taught me well!
Rene,
So happy you saw my video and can now have this great plugin in your bag of tools to use for website building! Yes I remember your site well, use it as a case study too 🙂