SCORE Workshop: Grow Your Business Through Social Media Marketing
July 9, 2018
Website Troubleshooting: Broken Forms
July 23, 2018
WordPress, one of the most popular content management systems, makes up approximately 25% of the online world’s websites—and for good reason. In addition to its user-friendly platform and fully customizable features, WordPress offers an extension of your website’s functionality through the use of online plugins.
Plugins allow you to add virtually any feature to your website without a single line of code. At the WordPress plugin directory, there are thousands of free plugins available for download. Because the majority of these plugins are free, they typically don’t come with manuals/specific instructions for their use or maintenance, so Analytic Design wants to set you on the right path with a few important rules of thumb to maintain plugins on your WordPress website, as well as solutions to some common plugin errors.
Update your Plugins
New versions of plugins offer new features, updated security patches, and bug fixes, which are crucial to the well-being of your website and can offer solutions to simple issues or bugs within the plugin previously. Be sure to update your plugins on a regular basis. Updating your website’s plugins can be done automatically through WordPress, or manually.
A word of caution: when you install or update plugins, they change and add code to your website, which can cause unexpected issues. If you find that your plugins aren’t performing correctly, contact a professional website developer or editor.
Delete Unused Plugins
Whether it’s to avoid clutter within your WordPress dashboard or avoid slow website response time, deleting unused plugins is important in maintaining your WordPress plugins and website.
Poorly Coded Plugins
This issue can be avoided entirely by checking the compatibility of the plugin and reviewing the user ratings before installing it.
Plugin is conflicted with your version of WordPress
This error can occur if you haven’t updated WordPress to a newer version or the plugin is not yet updated for the latest version of WordPress. You can either update the pWordpress core or individually check that each plugin you install is compatible with your version of WordPress.
Plugin is conflicted with other plugins
This is a common error for WordPress users. Its caused by two (or more) plugins performing the same action or serving the same function, which leads to a “fight” for resources. The simplest solution to this error is to choose one plugin to keep, and one to delete.
Plugins are essential to the functionality of your WordPress website, so maintaining them is especially important. If none of the above solutions work, contact Analytic Design for a free consultation! Our designers, developers, and support staff have a collective twenty years of experience and technical expertise in the marketing, analytics, design and programming arenas, which gives Analytic Design a competitive edge to help you develop strategy more effectively. Our expert consultants will partner with you to improve performance, enhance infrastructure and stimulate growth. To learn more about our services, click here.
