Plugins add extra features to your website that aren’t available by default on WordPress. Sometimes, plugins or third-party themes may cause conflicts. This guide shows you how to resolve most plugin and theme issues.
In this guide
Plugins are created by individuals and companies in the WordPress community and made available to all users. Like with any technology, you could run into an error while using a plugin. The most common errors you might experience include:
- The error message: “There has been a critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.”
- The “White Screen of Death”, which is a blank, white error page.
- Memory exhaustion errors.
- Other errors or unexpected behavior.
Follow these steps to identify the plugin or theme causing the issue. Once identified, contact the developer to resolve the issue.
To prevent frequent plugin errors or avoid issues that could crash your site, take the following precautions.
- Create a staging site. This is a cloned version of your website you can use to test changes privately before applying them to your live site.
- Consider if you really need a plugin. For example, our Jetpack plugin already handles your website security, backups, and general performance-boosting features. Check our list of more built-in features you may not need a plugin for.
- Choose well-developed plugins that are used on many websites and have many positive reviews from other users. Check our advice on how to select safe and trustworthy plugins.
- Keep your plugins and themes up to date to avoid bugs. New plugin updates typically include bug fixes and general performance improvements. Therefore, we recommend only using plugins that have been updated in the past six months.
Reviewing your error logs is the best place to start when tracking down an error on your site or in your site’s dashboard.
For example, if you see the error, “There has been a critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions” but didn’t receive the email, check the PHP logs for any fatal errors related to the issue.
In some cases, you may not receive the critical error message on your site, but you could be getting other errors on your site or in your site’s dashboard. You can review your site’s error logs to pinpoint which theme or plugin has fatal or critical errors that could interfere with your site or dashboard’s performance.
Learn how to use error logs to resolve critical errors on your website.
If the error logs do not provide the information you need to resolve the issue, your next step is to temporarily switch to a default theme, then deactivate all plugins to identify the cause.
Follow these steps to troubleshoot plugin and third-party theme issues on your site:
Start by switching to a default WordPress theme, like Twenty Twenty-Four or Twenty Twenty-Five, to see if the issue persists. Follow these steps to switch your theme:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Appearance → Themes (or Appearance → Theme Showcase if using the WP Admin).
- Note your site’s current theme, which will be first in the list with the “Active” label.
- Search for Twenty Twenty-Four or Twenty Twenty-Five, click the theme’s thumbnail and click the “Activate” button.
If the issue goes away, your theme is causing the issue. You can:
- Change your theme.
- Contact the theme’s author and ask them to resolve the issue.
If the issue doesn’t go away, reactivate your previous theme, and proceed to the next step.
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Plugins → Installed Plugins.
- Temporarily deactivate all plugins from your website (except for Akismet and Jetpack, which are automatically managed for you and unlikely to be the cause of the issue.)
- Check if the error still appears. If the issue is no longer present, the plugin(s) you deactivated was causing the conflict.
- Now, determine which plugin is causing the conflict by reactivating your plugins one by one and checking after each one is reactivated. Once the error returns, you’ll know that the plugin you just reactivated is the one causing the issue.
Once you learn which plugin was the cause, you can leave the plugin deactivated and contact the plugin’s developer to resolve the issue.
While deactivating all plugins following the steps in the previous section, your website could look out of order or missing key elements provided by those plugins. You have two options for testing for theme or plugin conflicts without impacting what your visitors see.
A staging site is a replica of your live, or production, website. You can create a staging site to deactivate plugins and switch themes without impacting your live site.
Learn how to create a staging site to troubleshoot errors.
The Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin can help you find plugin and theme conflicts on your live site without affecting the live site publicly.
Follow this guide to install and use the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin.
If you cannot access your site’s dashboard to deactivate plugins or themes, your site might be disconnected from Jetpack. Jetpack can become disconnected from your site when a plugin or theme causes a critical error.
Our Resolve Jetpack Errors support guide may help you fix this and includes additional steps you can take if the issue is unresolved.
