What to do when a plugin breaks your WordPress blog

Easy steps to follow if that new WordPress plugin breaks your blog

There are thousands of WordPress plugins out there and eventually you could run into one that will break your blog. The most common reason this happens is, either the plugin is poorly coded or just conflicts with another plugin your have already installed on your blog.

If you ever experience this problem, there are some very simply things you can do to solve it.

Deactivate the plugin, via WordPress admin panel:

* To deactivate the suspected plugin, you will need to login to your WordPress admin control panel. Next, you want to navigate to the plugin list and deactivate the suspected plugin.

Rename the plugin using FTP client software:

* If you were unable to fix the problem via the WordPress admin control panel, you will need to FTP into your hosting server and rename the plugin folder and/or the plugin file. This is due to the crash that has crashed the admin control panel.

Delete the plugin via your FTP client software:

* If the above two methods didn’t fix the issue you can remove the newly install plugin folder and files altogether. This will prevent WordPress from loading the plugin with the suspected destructive code that is crashing your blog.

Deactivate all of your WordPress plugins via PHPMyAdmin:

* If the plugin altered the tables in the database when the plugin activation occurred, your WordPress blog may continue to crash. This may occur even if you have deleted the plugin folder and/or the plugin files via FTP.

In this extreme circumstance you will need to login your PHPMyadmin panel, via Plesk or Cpanel. Once you have successfully login you want to navigate to the WP database and look through the “wp-option” table. Locate the “active_plugins” column and delete the active plugins in reside in the “options_value” field. Next, you want to check to see if your blog is back online and that the admin panel functions properly.

Additional thoughts:
If you have to resort to PHPMyadmin to fix the plugin issue, will have to reactivate all of your plugins to get them working.

Article sources:

Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database
A Plugin Broke Your WordPress Blog? Here Is What To Do