As WordPress theme developers we always do our best to ensure that our magazine WordPress themes are compatible with the most popular WordPress plugins out there. However, when it comes to 3rd party plugins, there is no way to guarantee that your WordPress theme will always be compatible with all 3rd party plugins you are using on your website.
There are thousands of WordPress plugins with all kinds of functionality and countless of additional features available, all with their own special features and requirements and it’s quite impossible to guarantee full compatibility with all WordPress plugins at any time. Especially since the most common reason for plugin conflicts is incompatibility of plugins with other plugins.
Reasons for plugin issues and incompatibilities
Please always keep in mind that usually every plugin you install on your WordPress website will implement additional 3rd party code to your website in order to provide the particular functionality. This also means that there always is a possibility that this additional code will cause conflicts with your WordPress installation, your WordPress theme or other plugins that you might have installed.
This happens especially when plugins implement custom code that does not meet WordPress Coding Standards, for example when default WordPress filters are being modified in a way that won’t work well with other plugins or WordPress themes. One of the main reasons for plugin issues are conflicts with other plugins, this usually may happen when you use multiple plugins that actually do the same thing or in case plugins simply are not compatible with each other.
It’s highly recommended to only install WordPress plugins on your website that are really needed. There is no need to have 30+ plugins installed if you only use 2-3 of them, especially since every installed plugin can potentially cause conflicts, slow-down your website or even lead to security vulnerabilities. Please also only install one plugin for a particular purpose. That means if you need a plugin for social buttons, then install one plugin and not several plugins that do the same thing.
What to do in case of plugin conflicts on your WordPress website
In general we can’t provide support for 3rd party plugins as we haven’t developed these plugins and we can’t analyze or test every plugin that is available out there. There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress and it’s impossible to provide helpful plugin support for these plugins, unless you’re the plugin developer.
In case you have issues that are related to plugins, the first thing you could do is disable other plugins on your website one by one to identify the plugin that is causing the plugin conflict. If plugins are breaking the layout of your WordPress theme, you could do the same to identify the plugin and then replace it with another plugin that works well within your environment.
If you are having issues with specific plugins that you definitely need in order to run your website and don’t want to replace them with other plugins or if there are no plugin alternatives, you can try to contact the plugin developers and ask for plugin support. Usually plugin developers are aware of common issues with their plugins and possibly there is an easy solution for your plugin issue.