Have you installed some plugins and your WordPress site no longer works? Did you run into strange errors on your WordPress site that appeared after the last update? Would you like to understand if your theme is compatible with the plugins you have installed?
Diagnostic Mode on WordPress | How to Activate?
To find out, follow me in this article in which we will see together how to check the compatibility between plugin installed and theme activated using the diagnostic mode of WordPress.
There are many ways to check for compatibility errors, some more complex that requires systems and programming skills and others smarter and easily applicable even by those who have no particular technical skills, in this article I will focus on this second mode .
Site Health
With the WordPress version 5.2, a very useful “ Site Health ” tool was introduced, natively integrated into the CMS, capable of providing a great deal of information on the overall health of the site.
This feature can be found under the menu item ” Tools “.
The version integrated with WordPress consists of two items: ” Status ” and ” Information “, very useful for checking if your site is correctly configured.
Under ” Status” you are listed all the critical errors and all the improvements recommended by the WordPress team just to try to best configure your installation. My advice is to follow and apply all the advice listed.
While under ” Information ” you have an excellent summary table with all the configurations of your server, your php installation,mysql configurationand WordPress settings. This data can be copied and if necessary provided to a programmer or your hosting provider to try to solve a problem.
But what many do not know is that this “form” of a native WordPress can be easily extended for additional functionality very useful in the analysis and resolution of problems of compatibility between plugins and themes.
Diagnostic mode on WordPress
One of the main causes of errors in WordPress is given precisely by the compatibility between installed plugins and between plugins and installed theme.
Precisely because there are many plugins and many themes that you can install and activate on your website, the risk of running into errors, often caused by careless plugin developers, is very high .
To understand if there are compatibility problems between plugins or between plugin and theme, all you have to do is install and activate the extension of the integrated module Site Health (Site Health), in this way you will have two further functions in the monitoring panel: ” Diagnostics ”and“ Tools “.
The Diagnostic mode on WordPress is the one for you to check and solve the errors that have recently appeared on your site, let’s see how to activate it.
Install the Site Health plugin
- First, you need to install the Site Health plugin which is the extension to the pre-installed native module.
- Go to the WordPress plugin page, search for ” Site Health ” and then install and activate the plugin
You will have noticed that on the main installation page, under each single plugin, a new ” Diagnostics ” link has been activated
Activate the diagnostic mode for WordPress
To activate the diagnostic mode you have many possibilities, the simplest is to access the module home page, select the ” Diagnostics ” tab and then click on the ” Activate diagnostic mode ” button
In this way, you will enter a particular mode, visible only to you who are connected and not to users who browse the site, in which all the unnecessary plugins will be disabled and the active theme will be the default.
Previewing a page you will see it as you would see if all plugins were disabled and the theme was the default
As mentioned, this mode will only be visible to you, none of the users who access the site will notice your test and you can make the necessary checks to solve any problems in complete safety.
Check compatibility between plugins
As mentioned, by activating the diagnostic mode all plugins will be disabled and you will return to the default theme, so the theme you normally use will also be deactivated.
Also from the diagnostics panel you will have the possibility to reactivate the plugins and themes, one at a time and see the result in real time.
Thanks to this mode I was able to identify a plugin of my blog that was in conflict with a second plugin, generating an exception that blocked its loading.
At this point, to check the compatibility and solve the problems, my advice is to proceed step by step starting from the reactivation of your theme and checking the normal functionality, net of plugins.
Once you have reactivated the theme, proceed with the reactivation of one plugin at a time and contextually check that everything loads correctly, until you arrive at the identification of the offending plugin.
Once the plugin has been identified, you can decide how to proceed, whether to disable it permanently, whether to look for an alternative that does not give compatibility problems or whether to try to solve the problem by communicating it to the developer of the plugin for a bugfix.
Disable the diagnostic mode for WordPress
As mentioned, the plugin puts your site in diagnostic mode only for you who are connected, once the test is finished and the problem has been identified you can return to normal operation.
- To do this, simply click on the “ Disable Diagnostic Mode ” button from the main page of the module
- By clicking on the button ” Disable Mode Diagnostics ‘placed in’ wordpress header under the menu item” Diagnostic Mode ” and you will return to normal operation.
- In this way all the plugins will be reactivated and put in the state they were in before the activation of the diagnostic mode, as well as for the theme, everything will return as if you had not done anything.
I find that this feature is absolutely essential for the management and configuration of a website made in wordpress.
Additional tools for checking file integrity
In addition to the diagnostic mode functionality, the plugin activates an additional tab called ” Tools ” with which you can perform verification tests on:
- File integrity – to verify that your installation files are correct
- Email – to verify that the email sending is correctly configured
- Plugin compatibility – to check plugin versions and declared compatibility
In short, with this feature you can do further integrity and compatibility tests. If you want to know how to secure wordpress I recommend this article of mine