How to Deactivate All Your WordPress Plugins Print

Why this is the first thing to try

When a WordPress site misbehaves, a white screen, a sudden error, the admin area acting strangely, a plugin is the most common culprit, and deactivating your plugins is the fastest way to find out. It sounds drastic, but it is completely safe and fully reversible: deactivating a plugin switches it off without deleting it or losing any of its settings, and reactivating puts everything back exactly as it was.

Think of it as the WordPress version of "turn it off and on again." If switching all the plugins off fixes the problem, you have proven a plugin is responsible, and you can then find which one. If it changes nothing, you have ruled plugins out and saved yourself chasing them. Either answer moves you forward.

If you can still reach wp-admin

This is the easy case, and the right way to do it, because it lets you find the specific culprit rather than just carpet-bombing everything:

1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins.
2. Tick the checkbox at the top to select every plugin at once.
3. From the Bulk actions dropdown, choose Deactivate, and click Apply.
4. Check whether your problem is gone.

If the problem disappears, a plugin was the cause. Now reactivate them one at a time, checking the site after each, until the problem returns. The plugin you just switched on is your culprit. It is a little tedious, but it is the definitive way to find exactly which plugin is at fault rather than guessing.

If you cannot reach wp-admin

Often the whole point is that you are locked out, the site is white or erroring and the dashboard is unreachable, so the method above is not available. You can still deactivate plugins without logging in, by renaming their folder over the file system, which WordPress treats as switching them all off.

1. Log in to cPanel at yourdomain.tld/cpanel and open File Manager, as described in our cPanel tour.
2. Go into your site's folder, usually public_html, then wp-content.
3. Find the folder named plugins, and rename it to something like plugins-off. That single rename deactivates every plugin at once, because WordPress can no longer find them where it expects.
4. Check your site. If it is back, a plugin was the cause.

To reactivate: rename the folder back to exactly plugins. Your plugins reappear in the dashboard, switched off, and you can then turn them on one at a time to find the culprit as described above. Nothing is lost in this process, you are only changing a folder name, not deleting anything.

Finding the culprit, then fixing it

Once you have identified the plugin causing the trouble, you have a few options:

• Check for an update. Often the problem is a bug already fixed in a newer version, our article on updating WordPress safely covers doing this without a repeat.
• Check for a conflict. Sometimes two plugins clash, or a plugin clashes with your theme. If the plugin is essential and updating does not help, this is worth investigating.
• Replace it with an alternative that does the same job, if it is abandoned or simply broken.
• Leave it off if you did not really need it, and take the small win.

Where the safe steps end

Renaming the plugins folder is safe. Editing plugin files, editing the database to force a plugin off, or digging into why a specific plugin conflicts at the code level is not DIY territory, and it is where a wrong move turns one broken plugin into a broken site. If deactivating plugins has identified a culprit you cannot resolve, or if switching them all off did not help and you are still stuck, open a support ticket. Tell us what you have already tried, including that you have tested with plugins deactivated, it genuinely narrows down the cause and gets you a faster answer.

Good to know

This one technique is behind a huge share of WordPress fixes, which is why so many of our other articles point back to it. Keeping only the plugins you actually use makes it far less likely you will ever need it, our article on safely deleting unused plugins covers that housekeeping, and a lean plugin list is a faster, safer, more stable site. And if all of this feels like more than you want to manage, our WordPress update and security services exist precisely so that keeping plugins healthy is our job rather than yours.