Quickly Resolve Plugin Conflicts with WP Freighter

Update Sept 12th 2020 – WP Freighter is now launched wpfreighter.com.

I’m currently building WP Freighter which is a WordPress plugin that enables lightning fast ⚡ duplicate copies of your WordPress site. There are many potential use cases for WP Freighter, however I’m really excited for its ability to safely identify theme or plugin incompatibles. WordPress plugin authors and maintenance providers are going to really enjoy this.

Imagine being able to sign into one of your customer’s websites and then safely deactivate plugins or even activate a default theme, right on their live site. Sound improbable? Let’s look at how WP Freighter makes that possible without wasting any time performing site migrations or deploying to a separate environment.

Duplicating database tables right on the live site.

A WordPress site is made up of files and a database. Typical the database only takes up a fraction of the storage space when compared to the files. Most of my own customer’s databases are within 100MBs whereas it’s common to have many GBs of files even on small sites. With WP Freighter we can duplicate the WordPress database tables over to a new unique database table prefix. Then with the trick of a session cookie we can switch over and view that database copy while leaving the live version of the site untouched.

Quickly troubleshooting with WP Freighter.

In the following video walkthrough I demonstrate installing WP Freighter, cloning the existing site’s database, switching to the cloned copy, then troubleshooting plugins and themes. Be warned that files are shared in this demonstration. While troubleshooting be sure not to delete or change any files. Only make database changes.

Resolving WordPress Conflicts With Stackable
Resolving WordPress Conflicts With Stackable