Blog / friday roundup
Seven plugins we install when fixing a site
The seven WordPress plugins we install on repair jobs, what each one tells us, and why most of them come straight back off once the site is healthy.
Most of the WordPress sites we are asked to look at are not broken in an interesting way. Something was changed, something expired, or something was never configured properly, and the symptoms turn up somewhere unrelated. Over the years we have settled on a small set of plugins we install temporarily to find out what is actually happening. None of them make a site faster on their own. They make the problem visible, which is usually the slow part of any repair.
Query Monitor
This is the first thing we install when a site is slow and nobody can say why. It drops the database queries, hooks, HTTP requests and PHP notices for the page you are looking at into the admin bar, and it names the plugin or theme responsible for each one. Nine times out of ten the cause is a single plugin making an external API call on every page load, and Query Monitor points at it in under a minute. We deactivate it when the job is finished, because it logs a lot and there is no reason to carry that weight on a live site.
WP Crontrol
WordPress schedules its own work through wp-cron, and on a site that has been running for a few years that schedule is usually full of jobs left behind by plugins nobody has installed since 2019. WP Crontrol lists every scheduled event, the function it calls, and when it last ran. We use it to spot the backup job firing hourly, or the cleanup task that times out at the same point every night. You can also run an event by hand, which saves a lot of waiting around to see whether a fix worked.
Health Check & Troubleshooting
The site health screen built into WordPress tells you something useful. This plugin tells you more, and the part we actually reach for is troubleshooting mode. It switches your own session to a default theme with every plugin off, while visitors carry on seeing the normal live site. That gives you a clean conflict test on production without a staging copy or a maintenance window. If you are weighing up whether a plugin belongs on the site at all, we have written about how we judge that.
User Switching
Half the problems we get reported only happen to one person. User Switching lets an administrator become another account with one click, then switch back the same way, so you can see the dashboard exactly as the person describing the issue sees it. It is also the quickest way to confirm that a role or capability change did what you intended. Small plugin with no settings page, and almost no cost to leaving it installed.
Redirection
Once a site has been rebuilt a couple of times, its URL structure has layers. Redirection keeps the rules in one place, logs the 404s it catches, and shows you which old addresses people and search engines are still asking for. The log is the valuable part: it tells you which redirects are worth writing instead of leaving you to guess. Rules that have settled down are better off in the server config, and we went through the reasoning in redirects done right.
WP Mail SMTP
Mail sent by PHP from a WordPress site is the most common reason a form submission never arrives. This plugin sends the site's mail through an authenticated mailbox instead, so the message is signed by your domain and has somewhere to bounce back to when it fails. We usually point it at a mailbox on the same account, using the business email that comes with the hosting plan, and the delivery problem ends there. Its built-in test message is the fastest confirmation you will get that the fix held.
Yoast Duplicate Post
Not a diagnostic tool, but it prevents a surprising amount of mess. Site owners edit a live page to try something, get interrupted, and leave the half-finished version published for a week. Duplicate Post makes a draft copy to work in, or a rewrite-and-republish copy that swaps itself in when it is ready. We install it on any site where more than one person touches content, and we leave it there.
The pattern across all seven is the same: install, find out, take it off again. User Switching, Redirection and the mail plugin tend to stay, because they do a job every day. The other four are instruments, and a site carrying four instruments that nobody reads is just a slower site. If something is misbehaving and you would rather not spend your afternoon plugin-hunting, send our team the details and we will look at it from the server side, where a fair few of these problems are easier to see.