How To Troubleshoot WordPress Conflicts

As part of providing support, I often get an inside look at WordPress conflicts. If you’re troubleshooting your own site a great step is to disable all of your plugins and see if that fixes your problem. If it does, then you just need to reactivate your plugins one at a time until you discover the conflict. That’s tried and true WordPress advice. But what do you do if you don’t have access to the WordPress control panel? Here is a quick method I use to solve conflicts on other people’s sites.

  1. Go to the site in question and view it’s source code (in Firefox go to “View” and choose “Page Source”)
  2. Copy the source code of the site
  3. Create a new document in a plain text editor like Notepad or TextEdit
  4. Paste the source code into this new document and save it as index.htm on your desktop

Thanks to WordPress using absolute links for everything, you now a local copy of the code that WordPress produces. If you open this index.html file in a web browser you will see a copy of your site (complete with the conflict). Now that you have a local copy you can begin to trouble shoot. Next you will need to look for tags where plugins and the theme load scripts. These generally will be at the top and bottom of the page. Many plugins place a note saying where their code starts and ends which is helpful in hunting out the conflict. Here’s how I treat these items that are loaded:

  1. I start by deleting all the scripts that are loaded by plugins.
  2. If that solves the problem, I paste them back in and then remove them one at a time until the conflict disappears.
  3. Now I know not only which plugin caused the problem, but also which script or setting in that plugin is the culprit.
  4. At this point I can either choose another plugin or try to edit the one I’m using.
  5. If the plugins aren’t the problem, then I try scripts loaded by the theme by the same method.

That’s it. Now you know a way to help deduce conflicts in other people’s sites without needing to access their WordPress back end.

7 Comments

John Bates April 21, 2016

I have a conflict between Ultimate Member and a theme. I have no idea where to start to try and solve it. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Reply

    Bill Robbins April 21, 2016

    Great question John. There’s not a one size fits all answer here. It depends on what the conflict is. If items like a slider or drop down menus have stopped working, then that’s likely a javascript error. If you’ve recently updated to WordPress 4.5 and are having trouble, the update included some javascript changes that may be causing the trouble. Hopefully the plugin and/or theme will update to correct the issues if there are any there.

    If things just look a bit off, the it’s likely a CSS issue. This would be good news as it is the easiest to fix, but you may be on your own to actually make the changes since the theme and/or plugin author may feel that’s a customization issue and not support.

    If the page stops generating at some point, then that sounds like a php problem.

    You can make a copy of the source code of the page and start tweaking it and see if you can unravel the source of the issue. You could always ask for help with their the plugin developer or theme developer. If you purchased one or both, then hopefully they’ll help you out. If worst comes to worst you can always get a developer to fix the conflict for you. That wouldn’t be free, but should give you good results.

    Reply

PPI January 17, 2013

Thanks! This really helped me out since I couldn´t find the file that was loading the scripts!

Reply

Noah Whitmore December 13, 2012

Thank you, that’s actually a really helpful tip! Never thought about the fact that WP uses absolute links. You really can create a local copy of any page – complete with working javascript and everything. Thanks for the trick!

Reply

    Bill Robbins December 14, 2012

    I’m glad you found that helpful Noah. I know developers who don’t like that aspect of WordPress, but it makes it so much easier for me to troubleshoot problems without needing access to the backend of people’s sites.

    Reply

Maurintius March 31, 2011

Did you ever came across the fact that when you see or other people see the homepage, you can keep scrolling down and, where the page normally stops, it goes on and you see all the code from the posts you posted?

Thanks in advance for the help.

grzt

Reply

    Bill Robbins April 1, 2011

    I can’t say I’ve ever run across that one. Can you give us an example?

    Reply

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