Yeah, yeah. WordPress is nice. We know that. But when it comes to managing sites for yourself and for others, there are always a few decisions that have to be made.
Perhaps they revolve around a set of plug-ins, a certain theme, design decisions, or even around custom development. As extensible and flexible as the WordPress ecosystem has become, it’s not without fault.
All too often do we experience various nuances with upgrading our installations, dealing with third-party plug-ins, or with attempting to make sense of some of the more technical aspects of the platform.
Over the past few months, the team has noticed that there are roughly three areas that many users seem to struggle with at some point or another in their WordPress experience, so we’re going to do what we can to mitigate that.
Throughout the next three articles, we’re going to explain and look into decisions around theme installation, third-party plug-ins, and caching.
So let’s do this…
Lowering The Bar (And Why That’s Awesome!)
When it comes to setting up a brand new site, WordPress has helped to lower the bar. Buy a domain, install WordPress, done.
Don’t read me wrong: I think that’s awesome – I love that tons of people have some form of digital presence, but it’s not at all uncommon for users to get a bit carried away with all the options that the community offers.
Seriously, changing the look and feel of your entire site is a matter of browsing for a new theme and clicking a few buttons.
In that vein, the primary problem that we’ve seen is in the context of premium themes; many users seem to hit a few roadblocks during theme installation. Specifically, users will purchase a premium theme, install it, and activate it only to be shown a solid white screen or a cryptic PHP error message.
A Perspective On Your Purchase
Aside from the monetary cost of premium WordPress themes, there’s also a level of quality that one should justifiably expect when it comes to buying one. After all, if you’re throwing down some money for your site, you expect to get your money’s worth!
And most themes deliver. The code base is of high quality, the administration options are solid, and the overall experience is pulled all the way through.
Unfortunately, it seems as if too many users experience issues when installing their theme. So if most paid themes are of a decent decent enough quality, what’s up with white screens and cryptic PHP messages?
In our experience, nine-times-out-of-ten the culprit can be traced to a third-party plug-in, added by the well-meaning user, that did not come bundled with the theme.
Plug-ins are great. They offer slick functionality for customizing sites and typically play well with most themes. Typically, but not always. As a rule of thumb, remember the difference in cost between a plug-in and a premium theme. As much as open source software has turned the phrase,”you get what you pay for” on it’s ear, the old gal still has merit.
Premium themes are going to be developed with a variety of users and experience in mind. This is not to say that plug-ins are not, but premium themes typically undergo a serious round of testing before being released for purchase. Plugins can be created in minutes by a single person with a specific need.
The Practice of Plug-ins
The thing is, it’s impossible to test a theme with every single plug-in and it’s impossible to test every plug-in against every single theme.
Let’s recap, random plugins will conflict with random themes, and blow up in random ways. Nice. Now what?
How to Safely Change Your Theme
Here is a quick set of steps to follow when changing themes on your site.
- Always deactivate all plug-ins prior to installing a premium theme.
- Reactivate each plugin one by one verifying that your installation continues to hold. I’d even go as far as to re-question your need for each plug-in. Housecleaning!
- Enjoy your website’s new duds!
That covers best practices for theme installation and plug-in compatibility. As we continue this series, we’ll take a look at a few other common problems that plague users when managing their WordPress-based properties.
Do you have any tips or best practices I missed?
Graham Brenna says
Great post! I experienced this when I installed Standard Theme V2. I had some wacky plugin that I actually don’t use still activated and I got that white screen. I was smart enough to read the .php code line in the screen and determined it was a plugin thing. So I just went in via FTP and deleted the plugin. Problem solved. 🙂