What to do when a plugin update breaks your WordPress website

I was a speaker at the Seattle WordPress meetup this month and part of my talk was on what to do if, during your WordPress updates, a plugin breaks the site. The topic was WordPress maintenance which I wrote about in an earlier post.

Plugins aren’t always perfect

Sometimes, plugins will conflict with WordPress or with another plugin. When this happens, your site will either start acting ‘strangely’, the plugin doesn’t function the way it’s supposed to, or you get the dreaded “White Screen of Death”.

The first time this happened to me, I admit, I almost cried. It was my second website and I had just spent the better part of two days getting everything setup and loads of content added. I realized I needed a function not in WordPress so I installed a plugin from the repository.

White. Screen. Death.

Once I figured out how easy it is to fix this, I no longer dread buggy plugins. And I’m going to show you how to fix this. In fact, I have a flow chart. Can you tell I’m an engineer at heart?

You can download a pdf of this by right-clicking this link: Plugin troubleshooting flowchart

Step by Step Guide

If you have access to the WordPress dashboard:

1. Don’t Panic
2. If you updated your plugins one at a time, then you’ll know which plugin is the problem. Deactivate it. Test the website. If everything is working ok, delete that plugin, contact the developer, and find a new plugin that does the same thing.
3. If you updated all of your plugins at once, you won’t know which plugin is the problem. Deactivate all of them. Now, activate them one at a time, testing the site after each activation. When you find a plugin which is a problem, delete it, contact the developer, and move on to the next plugin until they are all tested. Now you can head off and find new plugins to replace the buggy ones.

If you don’t have access to the WordPress dashboard (usually you’ll get the White Screen of Death, but not always)

1. Don’t Panic
2. You’ll have to get into the file structure of your site using either ftp (preferable) or your host’s file manager.
3. Find the plugins folder. It will be at wp-content/plugins and all of your plugins will have their own folder within that plugin folder.
4. If you updated your plugins one at a time, then you’ll know which plugin is the problem. Deactivate it by deleting the plugin’s folder. Don’t freak out about this, plugins are freely available on the repository, so there’s no need to hoard them on your site. Test the website. If everything is working ok, contact the developer, and find a new plugin that does the same thing.
5. If you updated all of your plugins at once, you won’t know which plugin is the problem. Deactivate all of them by renaming the plugin folder from plugins to broken-plugins. WordPress won’t recognize them because they are in the wrong folder. Create a new folder called “plugins”. Now, activate them one at a time by moving each plugin’s folder from /broken-plugins to /plugins. Test the site after each plugin activation. If the plugin breaks your site, delete it’s folder,  contact the developer, and move on to the next plugin until they are all tested. Now you can head off and find new plugins to replace the buggy ones.

If deactivating all the plugins doesn’t work, you could have a problem with the theme. Try activating the default WordPress theme. Those are TwentyThirteen, TwentyTwelve and such. WordPress should always work with no plugins activated and the default theme active. If not, you could have had a corrupted WordPress update. Just re-do the update of WordPress.

Questions or comments? Let me know.And feel free to send your friend to this post when they have problems.