How to disable plugins in WordPress

WordPress has a huge number of plugins available for adding features and extending functionality. Sometimes plugins can cause problems, however, and you may need to disable them for troubleshooting.

This article describes how to disable individual plugins, as well as how to disable all plugins at once.

Disabling individual plugins

You can easily enable and disable individual plugins from the WordPress interface. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Log in to WordPress as the administrator.
2. In the left-hand pane, click Plugins.
3. Locate the plugin you want to disable, and then click Deactivate.
   To re-enable the plugin, click Activate.

Disabling all plugins

You can use the WordPress administration interface's bulk action feature on the plugins page to disable multiple plugins at once. But if you have a lot of plugins installed, or if the administration interface is inaccessible, there is another way to disable all plugins at once. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your cPanel account.
2. In the Files section of the cPanel home screen, click File Manager.
3. Navigate to the directory where WordPress is installed.
   If you installed WordPress in the document root directory, then go to the public_html directory. If you installed WordPress in a subdirectory, navigate to that directory instead.
4. Open the wp-content directory.
5. Right-click the plugins directory, and then click Rename.
6. In the Rename dialog box, type a new name for the plugins directory, such as plugins-disabled.
7. Click Rename File. All plugins are now disabled.
   To re-enable the plugins, restore the plugins folder name to plugins. The plugins will again appear on the WordPress administration interface so you can activate them.