At times, specific issues may be caused by a theme or plugin conflict.
How to identify a conflict? #
- Back up your live site before any testing and updates
- a) Use the Health Check plugin to test on the live site without affecting the front-end
b) Create a staging site using the plugin WP Staging; this creates a copy of your live site where you can make tests without affecting your live site - Temporarily switch your theme to Twenty Nineteen, then deactivate all plugins except for WpStream, WooCommerce, and Subscriptions; clear all caches then observe if the problem persists
- If the issue is resolved, then it was due to a theme or plugin conflict; reactivating each one at a time, then seeing if the issue pops up again will tell you which plugin/theme is conflicting
What can be done after a conflict is identified? #
As the name implies, the 2 independent add-ons work relatively fine on their own, but not so well together. Situations are vastly different, however, most can be dealt with as:
A. The ideal way to work that out is for the developers of the respective independent plugins to get together and sort out their differences. However, that almost never happens and the 2 parties will instead just blame each other.
B. Alternatively, one part under certain circumstances may try to pinpoint the issue and work around the problem on its own. That’s usually time-consuming and future functionality cannot be guaranteed as changes to the other add-on may still cause the joint venture to malfunction.
Depending on the specifics of the situation, we may choose to either allocate resources to deal with A or B, or not to take any action. Please, once a conflict is identified, provide us with all the details to reproduce. At the same time, see if you can get any feedback from the other party on your own (i.e. creators of the conflicting plugin), maybe they just know about the issue and can offer some tips.
