11 Plugins That Make Troubleshooting WordPress a Breeze

As great as WordPress is, certain problems and glitches will inevitably come up. It’s just a part of the experience of being a website owner. And you can either deal with these issues the hard way – manually – or the easy way – via a plugin.

There are a host of WordPress plugins that take the “trouble” out of “troubleshooting” and totally streamline the business of running a website. Here are 11 plugins for WordPress that will make your life just a little bit easier for website owners and developers:

1. Health Check & Troubleshooting 

First on our list is Health Check & Troubleshooting, a plugin that points out issues in your WordPress installation, plugins, and themes. It highlights configuration errors and there’s a debugging section that shows if there are server configuration issues that need to be addressed. It also allows you to enter a troubleshooting mode that disables all plugins and activates a default theme so you can poke around and figure out problems without plugins and third-party themes in the way — or it can help you identify if it is one of these plugins or themes causing the issue.

2. Akismet

Akismet is the top plugin for battling spam on your WordPress site. In fact, it comes pre-installed on WordPress, so it’s not a plugin you have to go hunting down. It does require a tiny bit of setup, however, but nothing major and works by checking your website for spam comments on a regular basis. It will flag spam comments automatically, which you can then clear out manually from the designated spam folder.

There are occasions where real comments get flagged as spam, however, so it’s important to manually check it out on occasion.

3. WP-Optimize

Another plugin that can help streamline, troubleshoot, and improve your WordPress installation is the WP Optimize plugin. Since WordPress automatically saves revision versions of each post and page you make, the database for your website can get a bit large over time. This plugin removes old post revisions, old comments, and auto draft posts to help reduce your database’s footprint and make your site perform better overall.

4. Plugin Detective 

The Plugin Detective plugin is designed with troubleshooting in mind. It streamlines the troubleshooting process and makes it easier to diagnose site problems and fix them. Essentially, it allows you to figure out which plugin on your site is causing a problem, specifically the white screen of death.

5. Disable Comments

The Disable Comments plugin is exactly what it sounds like: a plugin that allows you to disable comments on posts and pages. With a single click, you can allow or disallow comments. This is a great way to clear up spam, reduce the risk of malware, and also just shut down comments on areas of your site that don’t require this feature.

6. Solid Security

The next plugin you should consider adding to your website to improve the troubleshooting process is Solid Security. This plugin comes with over 30 different ways to secure a WordPress site and helps to bolster its defenses against things like malware injection and spam.

The plugin helps you adjust settings to prevent ddOs attacks, strengthen user credentials, force two-factor authentication, and fix holes in your site’s security, including security flaws within plugins and themes. It’s an effective and comprehensive option for streamlining the implementation of site security measures, which can all-around prevent the need for troubleshooting later.

7. Yoast SEO

Another plugin you’ll definitely want to consider using is Yoast SEO. This plugin adds a variety of features to your WordPress dashboard that make optimizing posts and pages for SEO much easier. It allows you to set a keyword for each post, a meta title, meta description, and then receive suggestions for how to better optimize your content for search. It also helps you set permalinks, change post slugs, and more.

A premium version of the plugin is available but the free version provides everything you need to properly optimize your content.

8. WP Debugging

WP Debugging is another plugin that makes it much easier to streamline the overall debugging process, especially within the wp-config.php file. It works by following debug constants on plugin activations and gets rid of them when a plugin is deactivated. If any errors occur during this process, a PHP exception will be thrown. This is an all-around useful plugin to have in your arsenal.

9. Broken Link Checker

Another plugin you should check out is called Broken Link Checker. This one takes stock of all your existing internal and external links and checks to see if any of them are broken. Once these bad links are found, you can then fix them and improve the overall user experience of your site — as well as its SEO ranking.

In addition to checking for broken links, it also locates missing redirects and missing images.

10. SchedulePress

You may also want to consider using the SchedulePress plugin, which offers a quick and easy way to create, schedule, and publish social media posts. It allows for easier integration with top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and it offers a full content planning calendar so you can coordinate social posts well in advance. Essentially, this plugin just takes some of the day-to-day pressure off of social sharing by automating the process.

11. Social Media Share Buttons

Last on our list is the Social Media Share Buttons plugin. While SchedulePress allows you to schedule social media posts more readily, this plugin makes it easier for your site visitors to share your content far and wide through the addition of social media sharing buttons on various points of your website. With it, you can add social sharing icons for a variety of platforms as well as add custom share icons of your choice. A premium version of the plugin is available as well that adds greater design options, animations, sticky icons, and more.

There are tons of plugins floating around out there that can fix some of the most common issues with WordPress, especially if you’re a bit wet behind the ears about the platform. Hopefully, the preceding list will be enough to get your site up and running (and keep it that way!).

Are there any plugins that you like to use to troubleshoot or streamline site operations? Let me know in the comments section below!