Plugin repair
Nineteen plugins, one culprit, and a site full of witnesses.
Plugin conflicts are WordPress's signature failure: everything worked yesterday, an update landed overnight, and now something's broken — with nineteen suspects and no confession. The amateur move is deactivating everything. The professional move is reading the evidence.
Why plugins fight — and why it's always an update.
Every plugin is code from a different author, on a different schedule, sharing one house. They coexist until an update changes the terms — a new version claiming a resource another plugin holds, dropping support for your PHP version, or shipping a bug straight into production via auto-update at 3 a.m. The conflict was always latent; the update lit it.
The symptoms scatter misleadingly: a 500 here, a silent form there, a checkout that stopped, an editor that won't load. The cause is findable without guesswork — error logs name failing files, and failing files name their plugin. That's the difference between diagnosis and demolition.
The methodical version vs. the deactivate-everything gamble.
The internet's standard advice — deactivate all plugins, re-enable one by one — works, eventually, the way burning a haystack finds a needle. On a live site it also drops your forms, security, caching, and store while you experiment. We go evidence-first: logs, the update timeline, and staging reproduction, so the live site keeps running while the culprit is identified in the lab.
Then the actual fix, which is rarely 'delete it': roll back to the working version and hold; patch the incompatibility; replace the plugin with a maintained equivalent; or — our favorite diagnosis — discover the plugin was doing a job twenty lines of purpose-built code does better, and retire it entirely.
The standing cure: fewer, better plugins.
Every repair ends with the stack review: which plugins earn their place, which are abandoned by their developers (the future incidents), which duplicate each other, and which exist only because nobody wrote the small custom function that would replace them. Sites we maintain run lean on purpose — fewer moving parts, fewer 3 a.m. updates, fewer of these calls. We'll leave you the map even if you never call again.
Plugin problems on the bench.
The whole conflict taxonomy — each with a methodical fix.
Update conflicts
The overnight auto-update that broke the site — identified from logs, not guesswork.
Plugin-vs-plugin fights
Two plugins claiming the same territory — jQuery versions, hooks, caches — refereed.
PHP incompatibility
The host upgraded PHP; an old plugin fataled. Patched, replaced, or retired.
Abandoned plugins
Unmaintained code is a scheduled incident. Found and swapped before it fires.
Security-plugin overreach
The protector that locked out the owner, broke the forms, or ate legitimate traffic.
Plugin retirement
The whole plugin replaced by a few lines of purpose-built code. Less weight, less risk.
Single Error Fix — buy it now, skip the hunt.
One error, hunted down and fixed — 500s, white screens, redirect loops, broken pages.
Covers one specific error or broken behavior on one site. Diagnosis, the fix, and a plain-English note on what happened. If we can't fix it, you get a full refund.
Questions we hear a lot.
Can you find the conflict without taking my site down?
Yes — that's the point of evidence-first. Logs and a staging copy do the dangerous experimenting; the live site keeps its forms, security, and store running while we work. The deactivate-everything ritual is for sites with nothing to lose.
The plugin author says it's the other plugin's fault. Now what?
Classic standoff, and we don't need it resolved to fix your site — we need the combination working or replaced. We'll identify the actual mechanism (who breaks what), pick the pragmatic fix, and file the reports upstream if the authors want them. Your site doesn't wait for their peace treaty.
Is it safe to just stop updating plugins?
It trades a visible risk for an invisible worse one — unpatched vulnerabilities are how sites end up needing the malware cleanup. The sane middle: updates on a schedule, in small batches, with the auto-update chaos tamed. We'll set that up as part of any repair.
What does it cost?
Most single-conflict repairs land at the $229 flat fix, same-day. Stack overhauls (the fewer-better-plugins project) get a written quote after the review. If we look and can't fix it, you owe nothing.
Adjacent help
Sign-in rarely travels alone. Here's what usually rides with it.
Nineteen suspects. One methodical hour.
Tell us what broke and when. The logs usually name the culprit before lunch — flat quote follows immediately.