Solving problems with WordPress plugins
Plugins add additional functionality to your website that is not available by default in the WordPress software. There are thousands of plugins, mostly developed by other users and companies that have made their plugins available to all WordPress users.
Sometimes your website may experience an issue caused by a conflict with a plugin. These problems may include:
- An error message such as “This site has encountered a critical error.”
- A “white screen” error that appears as a blank white page.
- Other errors or unexpected behavior.
The steps in this guide will help you determine which plugin is causing problems on your website. Once you determine which plugin is causing the problem, you can contact the plugin developer for further assistance.
Preventive action
It often takes some time to resolve a conflict with a theme or plugin. Therefore, it is important to prevent these problems before they lead to serious consequences.
- Create a preview version of the site. This is a cloned version of your website that can be used to privately test changes before applying them to the live site.
- Consider whether you really need a plugin. For example, our Jetpack plugin already includes features for your website’s security, backups, and overall performance. More built-in features.
- Update your plugins promptly to avoid bugs in them. Plugin updates usually contain bug fixes and overall performance improvements. Therefore, we recommend using only plugins that have received updates over the past six months.
Deactivating plugins manually
To troubleshoot problems with plugins and third-party themes on your site, follow these steps:
- Switch to your default WordPress theme, such as Twenty Twenty, and check if this issue goes away.
– If there is no problem, then it is related to your topic. In this case, you can: a) change the topic; b) contact its author and ask him to correct the error.
– If the problem persists, continue to the next step. - Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins and temporarily deactivate all plugins (except Akismet and Jetpack, which are managed automatically and are unlikely to be the source of the problem).
- Check if the problem persists. If the error no longer exists, it was caused by deactivated plugins.
- Determine which plugin is the source of the conflict by activating them one by one and checking after each activation. For process-related conflicts, you must repeat the same steps every time.
- Switch to your default WordPress theme, such as Twenty Twenty, and check if this issue goes away.
Once you know which plugin was causing the problem, you can leave it disabled and contact the developer to fix the problem.