A common practice is to install plugins to enhance the features and functioning of a WordPress website.
Some plugins enhance security and enable you to monitor your website’s effectiveness. You may manage backups, operate forums or chat services, improve SEO, decrease spam, and perform many other site management tasks by installing plugins.
Despite how helpful they are, employing plugins may have the drawbacks
You won’t need to worry if you use the plugins properly. However, when choosing, testing, and maintaining them, there are a few things to remember.
This article will outline some ways plugins may cause a website to crash before outlining five preventative measures. Finally, we’ll discuss what you should do immediately if a plugin crashes your website.
What Could Go Wrong, then?
There’s a potential that one of your plugins is the cause of an unplanned outage of your website. Some of the most frequent ways that a plugin can contribute to your website crashing are as follows:
WordPress Update Aftershocks:
It would be best if you kept your CMS and plugins compatible. Your plugins might need an update or a configuration adjustment to keep functioning properly when WordPress is upgraded.
Side Effects of Plugin Updates:
When you update a plugin’s most recent version, you might believe it will be compatible with the WordPress version you are now using. However, to presume that is not always a smart idea.
Custom code mismatch:
If you’ve contributed customized source code to your website, you can find that a recently installed plugin doesn’t get along with your code, or you might find that a reliable plugin starts working strangely when you change your custom code.
Plugins Draining Resources from Your Server:
Your site’s performance may be affected by plugins, which might consume a lot of your server’s resources and even bring it to a halt.
A malicious plugin:
Unreliable developers produce plugins that appear to be doing what they’re supposed to but are actually up to no good. For instance, they might be saturating your pages with advertisements, rerouting visitors, and other things while showing utter contempt for the functionality and stability of your website.
Plugins and Themes Clash:
Strong connectivity between your plugins and the chosen theme is required. The plugin and theme may conflict if you’re using an overly sophisticated theme or one from an unreliable developer.
Make Sure Plugins Don’t Affect the Stability of Your WordPress Site
Strategies for preventing plugin crashes on WordPress websites
Implement a plugin approval process
When a plugin is installed, it may be put through many approval processes. These are designed to put on a lot of low-performing, unnecessary and untrustworthy plugins. A plugin’s developer must regularly update it to remain compatible with WordPress and provide the most recent security. The plugin’s release history and most recent release date may be found there. You shouldn’t install this plugin on your site if the developers don’t maintain it updated with WordPress security measures.
Test after any update of the plugin
In the era of quality assurance and software development, the goal of testing software is to ensure that the changes or updates don’t affect the existing software behavior.
Depending on your preference, you might update plugins and modify custom code several times a year. In either case, you must carefully test your site following any change, such as a CMS upgrade, a plugin update, or a change to your database.
The simplest method is to make a list of ten to fifteen things to check often, such as menus, landing pages, and the performance of your ads. However, the list must be kept manageable. Finally, it would be best if you took a test run that will take an hour.
Use only necessary plugins.
When one uses too many plugins, the site may break. But some high-quality plugins are coded in such a way that will use the server economically. However, the cumulative impact of numerous plugins running simultaneously on your website can have a major impact on the performance of your server. And using too many plugins also can bring down your website.
There is a simple method to reduce the overall amount of plugins you utilize. First, look for any plugins that overlap in functionality by reviewing every active plugin on your website. If you locate any, you should eliminate them because they are redundant.
It would be best to unify everything by installing a plugin with many uses and ensuring that no two plugins do the same function.
For example:
WP Automatic plugin is one of the best plugins for auto-blogging. With this plugin, one can easily get unique content from different websites. One can fetch specific content from any website and post it on their website. Also, they can import products along with their images, description, prices, etc., and post them on their WooCommerce website.
Compatible use them some plugins will require a tighter integration with your theme than others. For instance, a plugin directly affecting how information is displayed on your site will require deeper theme integration than one that merely lets you manage passwords. However, most plugins and your theme are deemed to be compatible.
You might be less creative if you choose a popular theme many other websites use, but you’ll gain stability. The widespread adoption and continued use of such themes are evidence of their compatibility with WordPress and several well-liked plugins.
Optimize site performance
IToprevent plugin-related site crashes, and you must have a dependable hosting provider who provides a quick and solid base for your website. Avoid free or extremely cheap shared hosting services since they may hurt your website’s performance due to events occurring on other users’ websites. In addition, you’ll have more control over the server that hosts your website if you select a dedicated hosting service.
Expanding your server’s capacity makes sense as your site’s traffic grows because WordPress and the installed plugins will have to handle an ever-increasing burden.
Conclusion: Make Sure Plugins Don’t Affect the Stability of Your WordPress Site
WordPress plugins update is important if you do not want your site to crash. An updated plugin will fix the bugs and improve the performance of your website. In addition, an upgrade solves the issues present in the previous version.
We have provided five important and basic ways to make certain plugins don’t affect the stability of your WordPress site.
If the plugins are managed carefully, one may prevent the site from crashing. Also, one must limit the number of plugins used on the website. One can use a plugin that will offer many functionalities like WP Automatic plugin, WP forms, All in One SEO, Yoast SEO, etc. If you carefully select and maintain your plugins, you may never experience a site crash. If one does happen, you’ll be able to rule out your plugins and pinpoint the cause even faster.
However, graphics and videos might sometimes cause your website to load slowly. Therefore, when adding an embedded video to your website, strike a balance between the two; for a website to load quickly, the fewer of them you post, the better that will be for your website.
You can go to the WordPress Automatic Plugin website and learn more about auto-blogging plugins.