Helper Plugins

There are certain WordPress plugins that enable us to debug PHP errors, actions, filters, enqueued scripts and stylesheets, remote HTTP requests, etc. In this section, we’re going to enlist those, give a brief overview of those plugins, and tell you how they can be useful while developing WordPress websites.

Query Monitor

Query Monitor provides a developer tools panel for WordPress.

It enables debugging of database queries, PHP errors, hooks and actions, block editor blocks, enqueued scripts and stylesheets, HTTP API calls, and more. It also includes some advanced features such as debugging of Ajax calls, REST API calls, and user capability checks.

This plugin should always be active in your development environment.

Here’s a brief introduction about the plugin and what information it displays and where.

You can checkout more information about the plugin on their plugins page

WP Crontrol

WP Crontrol enables you to view and control what’s happening in the WP-Cron system. From the admin screens you can:

• View all cron events along with their arguments, recurrence, callback functions, and when they are next due.
• Edit, delete, and immediately run any cron events.
• Add new cron events.
• Bulk delete cron events.
• Add and remove custom cron schedules.
• Export cron event lists as a CSV file.

This plugin is helpful in debugging the issues with WordPress Cron, whether the cron events are being scheduled and fired or not.

You can checkout more information about the plugin on their plugins page

User Switching

This plugin allows you to quickly swap between user accounts in WordPress. Without this plugin you’ll need to set the password for a given user with which you want to test out a certain functionality, and then login back to the WordPress site and that is a time consuming process.

Helpful when:

1. Issues are happening only for a certain users, and not all users.
2. There’s a need to test functionality for different user roles.

You can checkout more information about the plugin on their plugins page

Ideas to Explore:

• How do you use the Query Monitor plugin to identify performance bottlenecks in a WordPress site?