On Hunting Bugs

Bugs and glitches; they are absolutely everywhere. Anyone or anything that claims to be completely, 100% bug-free is probably lying. There’s bugs in everything. At the same time, there are tons of people trying to squash all these bugs. Programmers and developers can spend huge amounts of man hours trying to find bugs and fix them. I’m potentially one of those people.

Sometimes, bugs somehow squeeze their way in all unexpected. This is doubly true for things like WordPress, which generally have tons of plugins and themes, all often made by third parties. With so much going on, a bug can slip in here or there and occasionally break things.

When it comes to bugs in WordPress, there is thankfully a path you can take to help find a bug or other issue.

The first thing you do is to deactivate all your plugins, and switch to a default theme, ideally one of the “Twenty twenty” themes made by WordPress themselves. We do this first to see whether the problem is with WordPress itself, perhaps from an update that went wrong. If it is WordPress itself that’s broken, you can re-upload it and see if that fixes the problem.

Most of the time though, the problem is a plugin. Which is why we deactivate all of them, and turn them on one by one. This way, you can pinpoint what plugin is causing problems, and work towards fixing it. By turning on one plugin at a time, you can narrow down what is causing the problems. At some point though you do need to re-activate all plugins, to see if there’s a conflict somewhere. Plugins are written by all sorts of people and companies, mainly third party, so sometimes two plugins just don’t play nice with each other. Often, the problem is something that can be sorted out by changing a plugin, or finding an answer on a plugin’s support page.

With themes, they’re a little bit harder to nail down, but you generally have fewer themes to go through. Switching to the default WordPress themes (Twenty Twenty Three is the newest) can also help with detecting bugs.

At least WordPress does make it a bit easier these days. With the Site Health page, you can put your website into a pseudo-maintenance mode, while anyone else can see your site as normal. This maintenance mode allows you to deactivate themes and plugins, without distracting from the front end of your site. It also sometimes tells you where the problems are, and gives you a nice list of things you can do to improve your website. Although it can be a bit contradicting: the tips say to not have too many inactive themes, but also recommends that you have a default theme at the ready in case something does go wrong.

And if there’s something that stops working completely, WordPress will throw a “critical error” with an email link that tells you what went wrong, without having to go into debug mode. Well, it’s supposed to. I haven’t received any emails from these errors. And, to make matters worse, my normal tricks sometimes don’t work either. Still, I will power through until these things are fixed. Because that’s my job. And from everyone else’s point of view, you wouldn’t even know. Everything works fine on your end.