When you have a problem with your website, it’s often caused by
one or more of the plugins or the active theme.
Sometimes it’s because some plugins don’t play nicely together, especially when you have more than one plugin doing the same job. A typical example of this is having Google XML Site Maps plus All In One SEO and/or Yoast SEO all trying to generate a site map. They trip over each other’s feet.
So my usual advice has been to switch to the latest standard theme issued by WordPress and deactivate all the plugins. Then activate them one at a time, testing as you go to find the source of the problem.
While that’s still sound advice, it’s not always practical when your website is live and you may have visitors on it. You really don’t want your visitors to see a sudden switch to the default WordPress theme while they’re browsing on your site.
There are some plugins you don’t want to be without, even for an instant as they need to be active all the time for them to work. I don’t want to turn off my pretty links when someone could be trying to access one of my affiliate programs.
So wouldn’t it be nice to be able to switch themes and deactivate all of those plugins for troubleshooting purposes without affecting your site visitors?
This video shows how you can deactivate all your plugins and switch to the default theme without affecting your live website.