How to Troubleshoot Your WordPress Website Problems

I was having a problem with my own website. Some of the blog posts had the wrong comments showing up under them. In other words, under blog post 1, the comments for blog post 2 were showing up – completely off topic.

I first changed the theme back to the twentyseventeen theme. The problem went away. I assumed the problem was with my theme.

But, to make sure, I deactivated all the plugins and switched back to my normal theme. Again the problem went away.

That means that it’s not necessarily a problem with my theme or with one of my plugins, but probably a compatibility problem between the two.

I activated each plugin one by one checking for the problem to show up again. I found the plugin that is conflicting with my theme.

In my case this was the badgeos plugin conflicting with the Astra theme. For me, Astra is more important to my site than badgeos, so I will be replacing that plugin with something else.

I could contact both the theme author and the plugin author and make them aware of the conflict and wait for a fix, but it’s not that important to me to use the badgeos plugin. I may still let them both know, but I won’t be waiting for the fix.

But, my point in this article is to show you my process for troubleshooting a problem of this nature.

First, check the problem after changing the theme back to one of the default WordPress themes.

Even if that solves the problem, I still reactivate my theme and check the plugins by deactivating them all. If the problem still exists with all the plugins deactivated, then it is definitely a problem with the theme.

If the problem goes away with my theme and all the plugins deactivated, then it’s definitely a problem with the plugin. I just have to reactivate each plugin until the problem reappears. Then I know which plugin is causing the problem.

Once I’ve figured out if it’s the plugin, theme or both, then I can either replace one or both of those with a different theme or plugin that does basically the same thing.

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