The 4 Most Common WordPress Issues And How To Troubleshoot Them

• February 27, 2015
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What are the most common WordPress issues?

Though each site has its own unique maintenance duties and needs, some issues come up so frequently that nearly every site owner will tackle a form of them at some point.

Here are the most common types of WordPress issues we’ve fixed in the past month.

Over-customization.

The problem: A site we tackled was 80 percent complete by the time we got our hands on it, but everything was customized; there were no plugins. Long story short, we suggested to the site owner that we should address this issue due to the fact that these high-maintenance customization’s can become problematic. While at the time he was uninterested, he eventually came back, citing deprecated functions and plenty of the mess we’d foreseen.

The solution: We restarted the team, and within two months identified all of the custom coding the site was hiding. We created different plugins for the site, upgraded the WordPress version and it is now entirely well-oiled and up to date.

Expensive plugin extensions.

The problem: During research for an eCommerce site we were taking on, we came to find out that filtering of products within a catalog is one of the biggest issues in Woo Commerce; while there are many extensions available for to add this function, they all come with a fee.

The solution: We capitalized on the opportunity and got started. We now have our own extension which works on the top of Woo Commerce, aptly named “Woo Commerce Search Filters.” We created the option to add filters to any Shop page, a filters widget for the sidebar, the ability to both enable and disable filter attributes, and a customizable filter.

When two plugins must become one.

The problem: One of the oldest, trickiest and most complex problems in the WordPress book: the integration of two different plugins to act as a one. We came across the problem via a site that wanted to offer paid membership plans for its service. For each plan, there was a plugin named ‘WPMU.’ At the time, this plugin wasn’t supported by BuddyPress. We got to work.

The solution: We integrated the two by asking a developer to create another plugin that would essentially facilitate data exchange between both.

When no plugin exists.

The problem: One of our clients wanted to enable his site so that companies would be able to request a proposal online, at which point they could communicate back and forth regarding that proposal on a custom thread.

The solution: We developed a plugin for request management.

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