WordPress broken by Plugin

At some point in time, nearly every WordPress Blogger will experience a broken WordPress blog due to the recent activation of a non compatible plugin. A broken plugin can wreak all sorts of havoc on a WordPress blog including the inability to access the WordPress administration panel. In most cases, when a blog breaks, the fix is fairly simple.

The following tutorial outlines a few WordPress quick fixes for a blogger to try when encountering the almost inevitable incompatible WordPress plugin problem that is causing site errors or limited blog access.

How to Fix a broken WordPress due to recent plugin activation:

This tutorial assumes that you already have an idea of which plugin is breaking WordPress.

  1. Using an FTP client, navigate to your WordPress plugin directory /wp-content/plugins
  2. Locate and rename or delete the suspected problem plugin
  3. If you have made any plugin code modifications to your template files, undo those changes. You can access your theme files from /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/
  4. Once finished, try to log in to your WordPress admin panel.

How to Fix a broken WordPress when you don't know which plugin is the culprit:

  1. Create a new directory named Plugins on your computer
  2. Using an FTP client, navigate to your WordPress plugin directory /wp-content/plugins
  3. Move all plugin files from the Plugins directory on the server to the Plugins directory on your computer
  4. Begin moving each plugin one by one back to the WordPress plugins directory until the WordPress problem reoccurs signaling which plugin is the culprit
  5. Delete the culprit plugin