Plugins are Often the Cause for WordPress Jitters
Plugins are behind a lot of our clients’ WordPress problems.
Recently, we spent some time trouble shooting a site for a friend we know through the Arizona WordPress Group. She’s a writer and has minimal plugins on her site. She knows a little HTML coding and uses it for things like creating tables and hyperlinking phone numbers and emails “because it keeps my brain working.”
Whatever.
She contacted Mark when the Twitter feed on her site froze and her own efforts to resolve it were proved to be temporary plugins.
The Problems with Plugins
Here are few reasons why plugins can cause WordPress headaches.
Poor coding. Unless coding is your thing, you can’t fix this. That’s why we tell people to look at plugin reviews before they install any. A badly coded plugin won’t get many reviews, much less good ones.
Not updated with WordPress. The plugin search directory will tell you if a plugin is compatible with the version of WordPress you’re using.
Conflict with themes. This is big issue for theme and plugin developers. More theme developers are now building in social media and other plugins.
Conflicts with each other! Not all plugins play nice with one another.
We’ve observed social media plugins seem particularly finicky, so this is where Mark started his investigation.
Our writer friend had already performed the basic first-level troubleshooting steps:
She’d uninstalled the Twitter plugin and deleted the files.
She reinstalled it and double-checked all details.
She tried different plugins.
She’d checked her c-panel to remove additional files.
All these efforts worked everywhere except the home page, which seemed to have frozen the Twitter plugin. Even after removing all evidence of that plugin by deleting the files and checking the c-panel, the problem persisted—and only on the homepage.
Problems on the Homepage Front
While Mark investigated, our writer decided to try to hide the problem by creating new content to push it further down the page where it wasn’t as likely to stand out.
Like many WordPress sites, her Twitter feed was featured on a sidebar. She added new features to the sidebar to appear above the feed.
This didn’t change anything on the homepage. The feed remained stubbornly fixed at the top of the sidebar. The other pages, though, updated with no trouble.
Did her homepage divorce the rest of the site, she wondered. And what of the child pages nested under it?
Thank goodness, the kids were all right.
Mark asked her to update the page content to see if there was an updating issue on the page itself. She did, and the page updated the content. The sidebar remained stuck in time.
Back to Square Two.
A Zombie Plugin Took Over the Site!
After more investigating, Mark found the cause. It was a plugin problem, but not one that had been used in recent weeks.
Back in the autumn, our writer discovered a problem with the W3 Total Cache plugin. It was actually a pretty popular plugin and had a lot of positive reviews.
Then, while checking a site for one of her own clients, she noticed a couple of interior pages were posting warnings about this very plugin. She deleted the plugin, but the warnings continued. So she called the client’s site host who resolved it, she thinks, by removing additional files that lingered in the c-panel.
She then removed the plugin from her own site. A couple of months later, the Twitter feed froze and she started her own trouble shooting procedures.
It’s possible that because W3 works closely, maybe too closely, with Google, it probably kept caching the homepage over and over again based on what it thought W3 was telling it to do. Her homepage receives the most visits by far so it’s the one Google is most “familiar” with.
Mark found additional issues with how W3 interfaced with .htaccess files that we won’t get into here, but this is another major stumbling point with this particular plugin.
By fixing the .htacess and reviewing folders for any hint of W3 to remove, he was able to repair the site. We’re glad to report it’s working normally.
A Plug for Plugins
Don’t take this as saying we’re anti-plugin because we’re not.
Plugins save WordPress users a lot of time they would otherwise spend on coding. They even replace functions WordPress has dropped like the Link Manager (not to be confused with the Linking function on WordPress toolbars) many users liked.
Plugins also automatically connect social media feeds, which is a major way people link to websites. Sure, you can separately program links for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and so forth but why put yourself through it when there are plugins that will do this for you?
We believe some plugins are a must for these functions:
Security
Caching
Yoast
Antispam
Social media
Just be sure to research them before you install, and regularly check your site to make sure they are working properly.