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.