5 Tips to Conquer WordPress Plugin Fails

You might have found yourself in this kind of a situation that I found myself in: You are running your site, posting blog articles for the next several days out, and decide to take a look at the front end of your blog. This seems to happen less often then I want to because I am focused on the content of the blog, but often I’m surprised to find a “WordPress plugin fail,” of course messing up more than just that one section of the blog.

One thing that you need to keep in mind is that WordPress does not directly manage the plugin directory. If an issue comes up because of a virus or some big issue needs their attention, they will look into it, but they do not screen plugins, nor do they require (though they request) that all plugins work with each other.

Thus, we get third party software goes unmanaged and many times you will find yourself in my footsteps, trying to fix your website. We have a few tips for you to better handle when a WordPress plugin breaks:

1) Keep Plugins To A Minimum

The purpose behind this is that plugins will conflict with each other and break, so the less you have, the better chances nothing will fail. This might mean that you get a great WordPress theme for your church or pastor’s blog so that you do not have to use many in the first place. At the same time, a large amount of plugins can actually slow down your website’s load time and the magic number is 5 seconds, so if your plugins are making it take longer than that, you will lose significant traffic.

2) Backup Your Website Offline

Sometimes you do everything right and yet one corrupted or poorly written plugin can completely crash your website and wreck your database. You need to be very preventative about losing any data by regularly backing up your database and files on your server. Not doing so is simply asking for headaches in the future that could have easily been overcome because of steps you took today.

3) Isolating Any Plugin Conflicts

One of the first steps that any WordPress website should do if they notice a plugin has failed is to see if it is because of another plugin. To do this, you will need to go into your plugins and deactivate every single one of them except for the plugin that is failing. Check out your website to see if it is working and therefore confirming that another plugin is causing the failure. To isolate the culprit, simply go one by one reactivating your plugins until the original problem reoccurs. When you have found it, disable the conflicting plugins and enable all of the other ones.

4) Fixing the Conflict

At this point, it is your preference of what to do. You can contact the plugin developers to see if they are willing to work together to resolve the issue. If both plugin have a great track record on their WordPress plugin forums, this might be a great issue, but you almost might never get a response or be waiting months. An alternative is to either drop one of the plugins so the other can work or replacing one or both of them. The beauty of WordPress is that there are almost 400 million plugins at the time of this post being written, so you have choices. One decision that is not an option is you rewriting the code yourself, because any future updates will void any changes you have made.

5) Remove The Plugin

One scenario not discussed yet is that the only conflict that the plugin has is with the WordPress platform which is a serious issue. Keep a mental track of the various times you have updated the platform, because many times plugins have to update their plugin to comply with new APIs or use new functions. This may mean that you wait several days to update your WordPress platform so that you can give time to the plugin developers to make their adjustments too, assuming that it is not high priority updates because of security holes that WordPress is fixing. Again, keep your eyes open for similar plugins in case you have to disable the current one you are using and try another one.

Finding a good theme for your WordPress driven church website can also be a huge help. WPforChurch.com is a great option to clean, streamlined WordPress themes that are geared towards a church’s needs.

Check out our recent article on pastor/church blogging to get some good ideas on what to write about.

Above everything, be diligent in what you do and stay call. Rash decisions can lead to further mistakes that are outside the issues of the plugin and compound the problem.

What other tips would you suggest for this process?