What happens when you Deactivate a WordPress Plugin

Although WordPress plugins help site owners extend their web functionality, managing them creates site instabilities, performance issues, and cache problems. This article will explore plugin deactivation in WordPress and learn what happens when deactivating a WordPress plugin.

For example, you’ll explore measures that affect your site’s cache and speed, such as “what happens after you’ve deactivated a plugin responsible for speed on your WordPress website.”

What happens when you disable a WordPress Plugin?

Note: Plugin deactivation in WordPress also refers to “Plugin Disabling.” Also, ensure you’ve taken your site’s backup before disabling or removing a WordPress plugin. A backup plan helps you quickly restore and make your site go online with previous conditions.

Here is a list of measures, effects, and consequences you face after you’ve disabled a WordPress plugin.

Functionality

Plugin deactivation in WordPress stops its respective functionality. Once you have deactivated a plugin, the WordPress dashboard stops showing its respective options on the left panel.

For example, disabling a page-building plugin affects WordPress’s display of custom-designed page templates. When this happens, WordPress starts showing pages in native design, controlled mainly by a theme applied to a website. Such routines undoubtedly affect page performance in WordPress design, functionality, and display. Similar scenarios can occur with plugins that affect WordPress functionality, such as page designs, post display, or front-end output.

Regarding functionality in WordPress, disabling specific plugins may affect your site’s performance, such as site speed. In this case, disabling a poorly designed plugin that affects your site’s speed hurts your site’s performance. Such scenarios are concluded after testing, managing, or deactivating a specific plugin on a WordPress website.

Similarly, some plugins alter database entries when they are deactivated. Database entries with bloated, old, and outdated information are left behind when this happens.

Management of Plugins

Disabling a specific plugin shows improper management of plugins in WordPress.

Let’s address the subject in more detail.

Although deactivated plugins stop affecting the site’s performance, they remain in the WordPress core directories on the web server. This can result in several WordPress issues, such as speed cache and speed. Regularly taking website backups increases the package size due to ZIP files, random scripts, and other leftovers from previous plugins.

There is also a significant security concern. In this scenario, plugins are exploited with security issues if they are not updated to the newer versions—even if they are deactivated.

For example, WordPress repositories include lists of WordPress vulnerabilities, such as WP Scan. Here, you can find a list of vulnerable plugins used for WordPress sites. Attackers adopt this routine to exploit past assets with loopholes. Once the hackers find a site with outdated assets, the exploitation and takeover process becomes easy.

Deactivation of Theme-dependent Plugins

Some plugins are Theme-dependent and work together with a WordPress theme. In other words, some themes include a bunch of officially-supplied plugins.

In this case, a plugin’s deactivation may also affect the performance of a WordPress theme.

For example, Cheer Up is a WordPress theme for bloggers and fashion designers and contains many recommended plugins, such as Thumbnails Generator.

In the case of Cheer Up, if you disable an officially recommended plugin, such as the Image Optimization plugin for Cheer Up, it may stop functioning, as directed by developers.

Similarly, theme-dependent plugins always affect a site’s functionality to handle images, content, or data, as we addressed an example for the Cheer Up theme.

If a Theme suggests removing a specific plugin after you’ve used it for data integration, importing, or image optimization, you can proceed to change respective options accordingly. For example, Cheer Up suggests removing Bunyad Import once you’ve successfully imported a premade layout in Cheer Up.

Note: Keep in mind that if you update a plugin with dependencies, you may need to update relevant assets in WordPress separately. For example, updating the Cheer Up theme doesn’t update its packaged plugin, such as the Bunyad Import plugin for Cheer Up.

Deactivation of plugins that provide integration with 3^rd party Tools

Let’s discuss what happens when you disable a WordPress plugin that integrates with a 3^rd party tool, such as an Email marketing tool.

Disabling integration-based plugins could result in severe conditions. For example, disabling ConvertKit’s plugin in WordPress – an email marketing tool with a plugin for WordPress; results in losing integration between ConvertKit and a WordPress website.

In such scenarios, data integration would become impossible, useless, and unreliable in WordPress. Once you’ve turned the ConvertKit plugin off, WordPress stops showing ConvertKit’s landing pages. Also, WordPress starts showing pages in its native design layouts. You can expect WordPress to stop showing ConvertKit’s forms placed in pages, posts, or custom templates.

Similarly, plugins that work with an API require re-integration if you’ve disabled them for a reason. Here, API errors often create problems when accessing data from other tools.

Note: Integration-based issues occur when your site is migrated to a new web host. In this case, not only WordPress installation, configuration, and third-party integration(s) but also other areas of WordPress need a fix, such as the HTaccess file, redirects, and SSL re-installation.

Disabling plugins that provide real-time results on a WordPress website

If you disable a plugin that provides results on a live site, your site may go offline.

Take the example of caching plugins. Once you’ve deactivated a cache plugin, such as W3 Total Cache, your site will stop serving cache versions of pages, posts, and landing pages. This could cause your site to experience speed issues.

In the above example, a cache plugin will re-scan, manage, and change new pages once you’ve re-activated a cache plugin. Meanwhile, certain WordPress pages could experience downtime for new users.

Note: If you need to deactivate plugins that provide real-time results, see if the service offers a web version of the interface. If yes, you can safely proceed to the next step.

Deactivation of culprit plugins

Disabling culprit plugin(s) helps you find and fix bugs in WordPress-based websites.

For example, disabling 3^rd party plugins helps you find and fix errors in data integration. Similarly, if you’re testing various plugins for site speed, you may need to check multiple candidates for improved performance.

Deactivating culprit plugins fixes issues in most cases. Once you’ve identified a plugin causing problems on a WordPress site, you can proceed to manage plugins. This is what happens when you deactivate a WordPress plugin.

Professional Tips

If you need to disable a specific plugin, here is a list of tips to consider before deactivating it. The following tips help you avoid possible errors caused by deactivating a plugin in WordPress. So, let’s proceed to learn the consequences of deactivating a WordPress Plugin.

• Once you’ve deactivated a plugin, a WordPress site stops loading the plugin’s assets, such as script files. This helps users achieve various measures, such as speed improvements, A/B testing, or WordPress error tracking.
• WordPress still allows you to reactivate a plugin after deactivating it. Reactivation restores the plugin with the custom settings you’ve made. Some plugins may require clearing the cache after being activated again. If you see an alert in the WordPress dashboard, proceed accordingly.
• Deactivating a plugin is necessary for bug-fixing routines; sometimes, you’ll need to disable a plugin temporarily. You can also deactivate a plugin from the Hosting cPanel File Manager by renaming the plugin’s directory name. Revert the changes once you have done your job.
• On deactivation, some plugins start deleting previous data. Such conditions could turn your site into maintenance mode. You can also use a coming soon page to alert users.
• Disabled plugins can still access sensitive data stored in a WordPress database. Having that clarified, even if you’ve disabled a plugin, your site is at risk if something goes wrong. This could lead to data loss, site maintenance issues, speed gaps, or more HTTP requests.
• Be aware of possible consequences if you plan to make several plugins stop working. You can disable multiple plugins in the Hosting cPanel options, such as renaming the “Plugins” directory, which will disable, alter, or change all plugins on a WordPress website. You can also rename a separate plugin’s directory using cPanel File Manager.

Conclusion

So, what happens when you deactivate a WordPress Plugin?

Disabling a WordPress plugin doesn’t remove data from a site. However, such routines make a plugin go offline.

Deactivating a WordPress plugin triggers specific conditions on a WordPress site, such as concerns about security, site speed, and site performance.

Last, you can only change a WordPress plugin once you’ve assessed the possible consequences. As described in the article above, disabling page-building plugins in WordPress affects custom-designed pages, posts, and landing pages.

The idea of what could take affection depends on a plugin’s dependencies. For example, if a specific plugin controls site widgets, images, and custom design, disabling the plugin will affect everything on a WordPress website. We meant this while discussing the consequences of a plugin’s deactivation in WordPress.

Please let us know if you need more information on dealing with plugin consequences in WordPress. We provide on-demand support for WordPress maintenance, support, and bug fixing.