An incredibly easy way to find plugin/theme conflicts

I now add this plugin to all sites I build and work on.

It’s such an easy way to work out what’s causing conflicts, while leaving the site up and running so as not to disturb visitors. Just by entering troubleshooting mode I can disable all plugins and then try out different combinations until the quirk I’m troubleshooting appears, then I know exactly what the cause is.

For 6 months now I’ve been getting really annoying warnings in a certain plugin’s admin pages – every page change triggered a pop up in the browser saying I had unsaved changes. I was about to leave a message in their support forum, but then thought I try out Health Check’s troubleshooting mode. Here’s what I did:

1. Install health check and activate
2. Enter troubleshooting mode
3. enable only the plugin where I see the annoying message
4. check for annoying message – confirm it’s not there
5. enable other plugins one by one until annoying message returns
6. disable all plugins except the original plugin where I see the message, and the one causing it (the one I just enabled)
7. check for annoying message – it’s there.
8. enable all plugin *except* the one I think is causing the annoying message
9. confirm that annoying message is not there
10. make coffee and drink it while gloating smugly
11. exit troubleshooting mode
12. de-activate plugin causing annoying message
13. mutter “I am invincible” in bad Russian accent (Boris Grishenko – Golden Eye)

And then I reported my findings to the developer of the plugin I thought was causing the annoying message, explaining I’d used the Health Check plugin and steps I’d taken.

He had a fix and out within an hour and said thanks for helping to track down a bug he’d been looking for for ages.

It has in fact taken me longer to write this review than that whole process took.