FAQs About Freesoul Deactivate Plugins
With how many plugins is it worth installing Freesoul Deactivate Plugins?
It depends on how much your plugins slow down your website.
You may have one single plugin that slows down more than other 20 plugins.
Freesoul Deactivate plugins itself doesn’t introduce any performance reduction as you can see in the following table got by the WordPress smoke tests:
Of course, more heavy plugins you have higher will be the benefit of using Freesoul Deactivate Plugins.
In shorts, it really depends on your active plugins, it may be useful for just 1 plugin if that plugin slows down your website and you don’t use it on all pages.
How can I know what plugins I can deactivate?
Read here.
Do I risk to do a mess or break something?
Freesoul Deactivate Plugins gives you the possibility to disable specific plugins on specific pages. It’s up to you to understand which plugin you can disable on which page.
If you are sure that you don’t need a specific plugin and no other plugin depends on it, you will not break anything.
If you disable a plugin that is required by another one, of course, you will have problems.
Imagine e.g. you have a WooCommerce add-on and you disable WooCommerce, the add-on will probably not show some content or even give PHP errors.
The PRO version will automatically suggest you the plugins that you can disable.
Compatible with caching plugins?
Freesoul Deactivate Plugins is compatible with all caching plugins. In case you have an issue with a caching plugin don’t hesitate to open a thread on the support forum.
What about combined and minified files generated by caching plugins?
Usually, the plugins that give you the possibility to combine the resources, will generate a single file for each script or stylesheet combination, taking into account that some pages will need a different file. In this case, you will have all the benefits of Freesoul Deactivate Plugins also concatenating the resources.
This is a list of plugins that generate the concatenated files taking into account the different resources needed on every page:
LiteSpeed Cache (be careful it has also an option to use everywhere the same combined file, don’t use this option)
If you use one of the plugins above for the concatenation, you don’t have to worry, you will still have all the benefits given by Freesoul Deactivate Plugins.
Probably most of these kinds of plugins generate different combined files, the list above includes only the plugins that were tested focusing on this topic. If you have another plugin, just check that the combined files are not always the same on every page, in another case you will find the scripts and stylesheets of the disabled plugin in that file.
However, if your server provides HTTP/2 it’s better you don’t combine files because the assets are downloaded in a parallel way and you have practically no benefit merging the files.
If the combined files are different you lose the benefit of the browser cache, if they are the same, you lose the benefit of Freesoul Deactivate Plugins.
Does it work with multisite installations?
Yes, it does, but remember that if you have a Multisite Installation, in every single site you will be able to manage only the not Network globally active plugins and you have to activate this plugin on every single site, not globally on the Network.
However, because the number of Multisite installations is a lot lower than standard installations, it may be that some bugs that are triggered only on Multisite installations are still not discovered. If you find a bug don’t hesitate to open a thread on the support forum.