WordPress supports various plugins made by different developers, and that is why web owners love it. Plugins are installed to serve multiple purposes, but sometimes they can conflict with each other can affect the entire functionality of your website and may crash it down as well. This conflict usually happens because of complexity between two important plugins. These errors can happen on both Shared and VPS technology servers.
You may experience the symptoms of a WordPress plugin conflict in majorly two forms. Either your website will not function correctly, or you will see the white screen of death.
If you’re using a lot of plugins on your site, it can be a little challenging to avoid conflicts entirely. In such case, you should check for plugin conflicts smartly without affecting visitors count to your website.
Even if you need to take online technical support, you should not hesitate taking it. The 000webhost.com forum can be an excellent platform to find the quick solutions to various technical issues related to WordPress.
In today’s post, we will come to know about a few best practices that will help you deal with plugin conflicts. But before that let’s see how can we prevent plugin conflicts.
You might have heard a quote ‘prevention is the best cure’. Like daily exercising and eating healthy food are preventative measures to stay healthy, you should also practice precautionary care to your site to keep it free from plugin conflict. Below are few best practices you may follow:
Avoid Installing a Plugin to a Live Website
Never do any sort of testing on your live website. It is the rule no 1 of web development. Even if you have used plugins on your website before without an issue, you should avoid activating plugins on a live website. Always use a local clone to test your plugins first. This way you can easily find out the errors that can cause complications on your main site.
Don’t Install Plugins Unnecessarily
We all love a feature-rich website, but it doesn’t mean you have to make your site overload with unnecessary plugins. Try to keep plugin uses to a minimum. It is one of the best ways to avoid plugin conflicts. You should install a plugin that you actually need.
In some cases, in place of plugins, you may use a simple code snippet. Many snippets perform the same job as plugins. You may try them as well.
When you have limited plugins installation, the changes of conflicts get decreased automatically.
You may also try installing a single plugin for various features. For instance, you may consider All in One SEO pack SEO plugin for search engine optimization of your site. However, you should ensure that you are using all its features and components otherwise there would no benefit of using it.
Never Make Haste When Testing
You can’t expect plugin conflicts immediately. Sometimes, they get visible over a period. Therefore, it is necessary that you set up local environment and test all your plugins calmly.
Keep All the Plugins Up to Date
Make sure all your plugins are compatible with the latest version of WordPress. Also, don’t forget to check that they are recently updated. Most of the popular WordPress plugins are recently updated. However, if you’re installing a plugin that has not been updated its developers for last 6 months, there is a possibility that it has out-of-date code that can create conflict.
You should know what you’re updating sometimes, automatic update tool can update unnecessary files on your website. It may increase issues instead of decreasing
Ways to Identify Plugin Conflicts
We know it may sound counter-intuitive to most of you, but there are indeed some plugins that can help you find out and fix the plugin conflict issues.
Below are two popular ones.
- Plugin Organizer – It helps you change the order that your plugins are loaded. Moreover, you can enable and disable plugins on URL basis.
- Health Check – It is a popular WordPress plugin that lets you keep check on various configuration errors, including the plugin conflict.
How to Resolve Plugin Conflict
Deactivate All Plugins
Deactivate all the plugins installed on your site and then activate them one by one. For the same, you need to access the dashboard of your WordPress site. In case, your WP dashboard is not accessible; you can access your website through File Transfer Protocol. Many reliable hosting providers like 000webhost.com, A2 Hosting, SiteGround, etc. deliver file access and FTP support features.
After accessing your site, you have to rename the plugin folder. You may give it a name something like old plugins. Next, create a new plugin folder with the name ‘plugins’ and restore all the plugins one by one. This way, you can easily find out the actual culprit causing the conflict. You can delete and reinstall the plugin responsible for the conflict.
Clear the Cache
So you have tried various fixes, but nothing is working out for you! Don’t worry, try clearing the cache. Sometimes, plugin conflict issue occurs because of the caching problem, which may arise on your server and browser.
Cache clearing is a fairly simple task. You just need to access your WP administrator dashboard, then navigate to Settings and click on WP Super Cache button. Next, hit the Delete Cache button that you will find under Delete Cached Pages. It is as simple as that.
It can be one of your quick approaches to resolving WP plugin conflicts. Hopefully, the things will get back to the normal now.
On the Debugging Mode
If you are looking for a long-term solution for plugin conflicts you should turn on the error reporting in your WordPress configuration File. You have to add the following code above the line that says:
Code:
Once you have implemented the code, you will be able to notice all the warnings and conflict errors straight in your WordPress content directory under the filename: ‘debug.log.’ This way you will exactly know which plugins are causing conflict and you will be able to fix it.
Take Support Forum Advice
Perhaps you know that there is a support forum for every plugin listed in WordPress repository where you can find the best solutions to various issues related to that plugin. You can look for if anyone has already answered the plugin conflict query.
Final Words
We hope this tutorial will help you get rid of plugin conflict. Have you ever experienced plugin conflict on your site? Which technique did you use to resolve them? We will love to hear them from you. You can share your thoughts in the below comment section. We hope this tutorial will help you get rid of plugin conflicts. Have you ever experienced plugin conflict on your site? Which technique did you use to resolve them? We will love to hear them from you. You can share your thoughts in the below comment section.
