Plugin Detective – Troubleshooting Conflicts

Description

Plugin Detective helps you troubleshoot issues on your site quickly and easily to find the cause of a problem. Once the culprit is found, the problem plugin can be quickly deactivated. You can even fix your site when it has the white screen of death (fatal error). You’ll want to have Plugin Detective installed, so if your site crashes from a conflict or bad plugin update, you can get it back up and running quickly!

Plugin Detective is your best friend when you need to:
– Troubleshoot WordPress plugin conflicts
– Remove stuck .maintenance files
– Recover your site from fatal errors caused by plugins

We’ve all been there–something’s broken on your site. You’ve looked around the web for advice about what to do and have stumbled across the typical wisdom: deactivate all your plugins and then reactivate them one by one, checking your site for the problem after each reactivation.

Ugh.

Sure, it works. But who has time for that?

Find Plugin Conflicts with Detective Otto Bot

Detective Otto Bot walks you through solving your case one step at a time, all from one single screen.

1. Open a case and tell Detective Otto where you’re seeing the problem. If your site requires any plugins to run correctly, tell Otto about those, too.
2. Then, Otto will interrogate the suspects and track clues, checking in with you from time to time.
3. All you need to do is answer “Yes, it’s fixed” or “No, it’s still broken” each time. Otto will do the rest and find the culprit in minutes.

Best of all – Plugin Detective can work even if you’re seeing the White Screen of Death on your site or if all you can see are PHP errors. Please have a look at the FAQ’s for how to access Plugin Detective and log into WordPress even if you can’t get to your login screen.

Once Otto has identified the culprit, you can quickly deactivate the troublesome plugin and go about your day.

Remove Stuck .Maintenance File or Scheduled Maintenance

Have you gotten stuck in maintenance mode on WordPress? The dreaded “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute” message haunts you; the minute never ends!

With Plugin Detective installed you can quickly get out of these situations without the hassle of deleting files via your host or FTP. Just tack on this slug to the end of your website URL:

/wp-content/plugins/plugin-detective/troubleshoot/?restore=1

So that your URL looks like this:

https://yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/plugin-detective/troubleshoot/?restore=1

This will prompt you to log in and automatically remove that stuck maintenance file for you.

Who Can Use This Troubleshooting Tool?

Plugin Detective is a tool that requires no coding experience or technical knowledge to use. For that reason, Plugin Detective is the ideal troubleshooting and conflict-checking tool for:

• Any WordPress website owner
• Developers and technical support engineers
• Plugin and theme owners and their support teams

Debug Tool Features

• Strategically activate and deactivate plugins on your site to help you find the plugin causing trouble
• Open Plugin Detective for troubleshooting on any page on your site – both in the backend and the frontend!
• Choose any subset of your active plugins as the baseline for your testing

Loved by Plugin Support Teams

The Simply Schedule Appointments and Draw Attention support teams love to share this conflict-checking tool with their customers.
Plugin Detective makes it easy for their clients to debug performance issues and figure out plugin conflicts in a jiffy!

1.2.14 – 2023-06-10

Features and Improvements

• Fix PHP 8.2 compatibility

1.2.13 – 2023-05-25

Features and Improvements

• Update required WP version to 6.1

1.2.12 – 2023-05-25

Features and Improvements

• Update required WP version to 6.1

1.2.11 – 2023-04-27

Features and Improvements

PR:#25 – Compatibility with WordPress 6.2

1.2.10 – 2023-04-11

Fixes

PR:#19 – Prevent fatal error on WP versions where WP_Textdomain_Registry doesn…

Features and Improvements

1.2.9 – 2023-03-28

Fixes

Features and Improvements

1.2.8 – 2023-03-28

Fixes

Features and Improvements

1.2.7 – 2023-03-28

Fixes

Features and Improvements

1.2.6 – 2023-02-24

• no changes

1.2.3

• Fixed for WP 6.1 compatibility

1.2.1

• Fixed for WP 5.9 compatibility

1.1.8

• Fixed for WP 5.8 compatibility

1.1.8

For older changelog entries, please see the additional changelog.txt file delivered with the plugin.

Technical details

Version	1.2.36
Last updated	September 29, 2026
Active installs	5,000+
Rating	★★★★☆ 4/5 (49 reviews)
Requires WordPress	6.1 or higher
Requires PHP	5.3 or higher
Author	NSquared
Tags	conflicts, debug, performance, site-health, troubleshoot