Deactivate Plugins Per Page – Improve WordPress Performance 1.15.0

With “Deactivate Plugins Per Page” you can easily disable plugins on certain WordPress pages (or on all except a selected page).

This is useful for speeding up your site mainly because many front-end plugins will load their JavaScript and CSS assets on every page, even if you use them on one page.

How it works?

You can add deactivation rules for active plugins. For example for a contact form plugin, that you only use on the contact page, simply add a rule to deactivate it on all URI except on the contact page.

Deactivation Rules Options

1. Deactivation Type
– Deactivate on selected URI
– Deactivate on all URI except selected

2. URI selection type
– Page
– Custom

3. [Page] Select pages to extract URI from (it will update automatically if the page slug changes)

3. [Custom] Custom URI condition
– URI equals …
– URI does not equal …
– URI contains …
– URI does not contain …
– URI starts with …
– URI does not start with …
– URI ends with …
– URI does not end with …

4. Affected devices
– All
– Desktop
– Mobile

Plugin Groups

Create groups of multiple plugins in order to add deactivation rules that affect them all.

Debug Mode

Enable debug mode to see what is the URI and which plugins are active/inactive on the current page on the front-end. This will help you create rules and test current ones. A debug box will appear on the front-end if you are an administrator user.

Does it affect the Back-end?

There is an option (not enabled by default) that makes all rules with Custom URI selection to also affect the back-end. Some back-end pages will still not be affected in order to avoid problems, like the pages that control plugin activation, deactivation, updates, and installation.

Export/Import Rules and Settings

Since version 1.9.0 you can export all your deactivation rules and settings of the plugin and import them on another site. Rules with Page URI selection type, will be skipped if the same pages (both same ID and slug) do not exist on the destination site. In a multisite you can import into multiple sites at once.

Custom PHP function as condition (NEW)

Since version 1.15.0 you can add the name of your own PHP function to a deactivation rule so it is used as an additional condition. The rule will only work if your function also returns true. The function must be loaded in a must use plugin so it is available before regular plugins load.

Client Reviews

Precautions

Group plugins that work together

If you have a plugin that requires another plugin to be active in order to work, you need to add these plugins in a plugin group, and add deactivation rules to that group. Deactivating only one of these could lead to errors or the global deactivation of the other plugin.

Don’t deactivate plugins required by your theme

Some themes require certain plugins in order to work properly. If you deactivate these plugins you may experience problems.

Deactivation hooks will not run

When plugins are deactivated via my plugin, the actual deactivation function is not called, and the deactivation hooks will not run. Instead, to make it work per page, plugins are just dynamically removed from the list of active plugins before the page loads. This means that if a plugin has some actions that it performs when it is deactivated, these actions will not run when it is deactivated via my plugin.

For example, some plugins add code to your ”.htaccess” file when they are activated, and when they are deactivated, they remove it. In this case if you add a deactivation rule with my plugin to stop the plugin on a certain page, the ”.htaccess” code will still be there and work on that page, even though the plugin will not be active on it.

Don’t use this plugin to hide sensitive data

It is not made to work securely for that. It is mainly made for site speed optimization and it can also be used for debugging or solving plugin compatibility issues.

Backup your site

Deactivating plugins per page is not a natural thing for WordPress, and plugin and theme developers are not expecting that. It works great in most cases, but sometimes can lead to problems, to other plugins being deactivated or settings being changed. Always have a recent backup of your site and if you can, test your changes in a staging site.