HOW TO: Disable plugins in WordPress
As an active WordPress user, sometimes you may encounter errors that disrupt your workflow. To resolve them, you may need to disable all your WordPress plugins. Fortunately, you can easily do so even if you lose access to your WordPress admin dashboard.
This article describes how to disable individual plugins, as well as how to disable all plugins at once.
Let’s get started!
Disabling Individual Plugins
You can easily enable and disable individual plugins from the WordPress interface. To do this, follow these steps:
- Log in to WordPress as the administrator.
- In the left-hand pane, click Plugins.
- Locate the plugin you want to disable, and then click Deactivate.To re-enable the plugin, click Activate.
Disabling All Plugins
You can use the WordPress administration interface’s bulk action feature on the plugins page to disable multiple plugins at once. But if you have a lot of plugins installed, or if the administration interface is inaccessible, there is another way to disable all plugins at once. To do this, follow these steps:
- Log in to your cPanel account.
- In the Files section of the cPanel home screen, click File Manager.
- Navigate to the directory where WordPress is installed.
- Open the wp-content directory.
- Right-click the plugins directory, and then click Rename.
- In the Rename dialog box, type a new name for the plugins directory, such as plugins-disabled.
- Click Rename File. All plugins are now disabled.
How Plugins Impact the Speed of Your Site
Every plugin you use requires some amount of processing power. Therefore, if using too many of them could, it will cause your site to load slowly. That’s a problem because site speed is crucial to maintaining a successful website. Besides that, almost half of the users will abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load.
However, there’s a way to reduce your page loading times without sacrificing the number of plugins. You can disable plugins from running on certain pages. This makes them only load when necessary. Through this, you can reap the benefits of using powerful WordPress plugins to increase your site’s functionality, while also optimizing your pages’ speed.
