WordPress Plugin Check How to Check Plugins for Compatibility Issues

The huge variety of available plugins is a big part of what makes WordPress so great. But because there are so many plugins from third-party developers, you can occasionally run into compatibility issues. To find those issues, youll need to know how to perform a WordPress plugin check.By choosing your plugins, themes, and other tools carefully, you can prevent most problems before they happen. What’s more, diagnosing and dealing with compatibility errors if they do occur isn’t difficult.In this post, we’ll discuss what plugin compatibility means for your site. Then we’ll talk about how to handle errors as soon as you notice them, and how to carry out a WordPress plugin check to find incompatible plugin in the first place. Let’s jump right in! What does a compatibility error look like? This question can be difficult to answer, since the specific problem you’ll see will be based on the plugins involved. However, in general, these errors cause a specific feature on your site to function incorrectly or stop working.This feature may be inherent to the plugin causing the problem. Alternately, it might belong to another plugin, theme, or WordPress itself. In rare cases, incompatible plugins can even break your site – so this is an issue to take seriously.How to diagnose a potential plugin compatibility errorIf you think you may have a plugin compatibility problem on your site, don’t panic. In most cases, it’s easy to diagnose and deal with these errors. You can simply perform a WordPress plugin check, to see whether one of your plugins is actually causing the issue you’re seeing.The best way to do this is to disable your plugins, one at a time. We highly recommend doing this on a staging site for safety reasons. So you’ll want to start by creating a copy of your live site first (if you don’t already have one). Next, log in and navigate to the Plugins tab in your dashboard:Here, youâ₠¬â„¢ll see a list of all the plugins installed on your site. Under each one, you’ll see an option labeled Deactivate. The following process will help you carry out a WordPress plugin check for compatibility errors:Deactivate one of your plugins – preferably the one you most recently installed or updated.Check out your site on the front end, test whatever feature wasn’t working, and see if it’s fixed.If the problem has gone away, you’ve found your culprit! If not, reactivate the plugin and deactivate the next one on the list.Repeat the previous steps until you find the plugin causing the issue, or until you’ve gone through every plugin on your site. If none of your plugins are to blame, you’re likely dealing with a different type of WordPress error.Once you’ve figured out which plugin is giving you trouble, you have a few options. You can try uninstalling and reinstalling it, and see if that resolves the issue. If it doesnt, you ’ll either need to contact the developer for help fixing the error, or find a replacement plugin that does the same thing (more on this in the next section).Finally, it is possible for a plugin compatibility error to prevent you from logging in to your site at all. In this scenario, you can still carry out a WordPress plugin check. Youll just need to use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to access your site’s files directly. You can find more details on how to do this in our article on the subject.Automate your WordPress plugin checkWhile the manual process above is simple, it can still take some time to manually deactivate all of your plugins, especially if youre using a lot of plugins. To automate the process, you can try the free Plugin Detective plugin: Plugin Detective Troubleshooting Author(s): N SquaredCurrent Version: 1.1.6Last Updated: June 11, 2019plugin-detective.1.1.6.zip 92%Ratings 22,276Downloads WP 4.4+Requires This plugin, which won  WordCamp Oran ge County’s 2018 Plugin-a-Palooza contest, basically does exactly what we described abovejust automatically.Once you install it, you can use the new  Troubleshoot option on the WordPress toolbar.How to prevent plugin compatibility errors in the first placeThe WordPress Plugin Directory will let you know if a plugin is out of date and risky to install.While its certainly possible to diagnose compatibility issues after-the-fact, its better to try and figure out if a plugin will break your site  before you actually install it.While you can never 100% guarantee this, there are ways to significantly decrease the chance  of encountering any compatibility issues.Before installing any new plugin, you’ll want to:Make sure the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress. This information is listed on each entry in the WordPress Plugin Directory, and on most other sites that sell plugins.Check to see if the plugin has been updated recently. In general, avoid plugins that havent been updated within the past six months.Take a look at the plugin’s user reviews and ratings. These will give you a general idea of its quality. Plus, people will often mention any compatibility issues they’ve encountered in their reviews.Consider whether the plugins functionality overlaps with anything already installed on your site. Having two plugins that affect the same feature doesn’t guarantee there will be a problem, but it does increase the risk.If you’ve gone through this list and the plugin you’re looking at satisfies each point, you’re probably safe installing it. Just to be certain, however, it’s still smart to activate it on a staging site first. That way, you can run a WordPress plugin check and catch any issues before you install the plugin on your live site.ConclusionBy using plugins, you can modify WordPress to add just about any feature you want. While this is great news, it’s also important to be aware of the risks involved. The more plugins you install on your site, the more likely you are to run into a compatibility error at some point.Fortunately, most compatibility problems are easy to deal with via a simple WordPress plugin check. You can diagnose them by systematically deactivating each plugin on your site until you find the one at fault. Of course, we all know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. For this reason, you’ll also want to vet each new plugin carefully before adding it to your site.Do you have any questions about how to diagnose or prevent plugin compatibility errors on your site? Let us help in the comments section below! Here's how to check new or existing #WordPress #plugins for compatibility issues at your site