How to Disable WordPress Plugins on Specific Pages

Key Takeaways

In this video, I'm going to show you to turn off specific plugins on specific pages on your website. Here's an example. This page right here is built in the Gutenberg block editor, but it's loading Elementor files because I have other pages built with Elementor. But when you have Elementor installed, it loads files on every single page on your site, no matter what. But I don't want that. It slows the site down. It slows it down by 0.0052 0052 of a second, which is not much obviously, but it adds up because if there's a bunch of plugins here, like if we scroll down, there is no form on this page yet. We're loading code from Shore Forms and WP forms light, slowing down our site, the specific page needlessly. Now, I've gone ahead and disabled these plugins on the homepage. So if I click home, watch what happens to Elementor and WP forms light and shore forms. They disappear and this page loads faster because of it. This is simple to do. It's a two-step process. First, we install the query monitor plugin so we can see these details which plugins are loaded on which pages and then we use the WP plug-in manager plugin to turn them on and off. And both of these are free. The plug-in manager one has a paid version you can upgrade to if you want. The query monitor might have a paid version as well. I'm not sure, but everything I'm going to show you in this video is totally free. Everything you saw just now where we go to the homepage and the plugins disappear from the list. That's all free. So, let's head into the dashboard. I'll show you the plugins first. Let's go to the plug-in page. We have Query Monitor installed and WP Plug-in Manager installed. To find those, just go to add plugin, type in query monitor, install and activate this guy, then search for WP Plug-in Manager. This one's kind of tricky to find. Copy this and then command F or control F to open the search bar and then search for it. Even though the title is an exact match, the plugin is way down the list, like like way down. So, if you do this search without searching for the plugin, you'll probably think, "Oh, it's not here anymore." It's here. It's just way down here. And this is what we want right here. Activate and install that guy. And even though this has low numbers of installs, I've known this developer for quite a long time and they do great work as far as I've had experience with them and they have lots of plugins and themes. So, I'm okay installing it even though it's a low or infrequently used plugin. And then once those are both installed, the query forms or sorry the query monitor adds this bar up here on every page on your site. So we go to services page. It shows the load time and another time. Not sure what that time is, but this is how much data is loaded in megabytes and this is how many queries have been completed. To see the query list, tap on database queries or click on it and then open database queries here if that's not open already and then queries by component. Then it shows the plugins and their queries here. Again, we have Elementor even though this page is built with Gutenberg. So we have the Gutenberg Ultimate add-ons right here. So we can't remove that because it's needed for this page. But we can remove Elementor. We could remove the forms plugin. Again, even WP code box, that's a snippet plugin. That's not used on this page. Sure, forms is not used on this page. So, there's a bunch we can remove. To remove them, we go to the plug-in manager. This has been added by the second plugin we installed. This one has a pro version clearly, but you only need the free one. We can see Elementor has been optimized. Shore Forms has been optimized and WP forms light has been optimized. And all that means is we've decided which pages to turn those on and off on. So if I click on this gear right here, we see an enable and a disable. This just means that these settings are enabled or disabled. The plug-in is on no matter what independent of what you select here. It's that this these settings you decide to add here are enabled or disabled. So we can disable this plugin on all devices in the free version. You can pick specifically which device on the pro version. We disable on selected pages. So we have to pick every page to disable it on. On the pro version you can enable it on selected pages. If you have a thousand pages on your site but you wanted to have your form plugin only appear on your contact page because it's the only place you have a form. This would be the option you want to select here. Enable on selected pages be just so much easier because you have to select every page individually to disable it on. It can be a bit of a pain to go through, but it can speed up your site a little bit. For the page type, we can choose posts and pages and pages and posts. We have more options for the pro. And down here's where we select the pages. So, Elementor is currently disabled on the homepage. If we click here, we can choose the page that we're on right now, which is the services page and then click on save. And now it'll be disabled on the homepage and the services page. To prove that to you, come out here. We see Elementor right there. If I refresh the page, Elementor is gone. And whatever lag time that introduced in loading those files when they're unnecessary is gone, too. A big caveat is if you disable the wrong plugins on the wrong pages, your site could lose functionality. If you're not sure if your page requires that plugin, you might want to not disable it. Or better yet, test it on a staging site or a local site to make sure nothing is broken when you disable plugins. And then if everything works fine, you can port that to your live site and Bob's your uncle. You have plugins enabled, disabled on specific pages. And if you want to upgrade to the pro version to do things like enable only on selected pages, I'll drop a link to that in the description down below. It is an affiliate link. It's not going to cost you any more to buy through that, but I will get a credit for it if you end up purchasing. So, I appreciate that. It helps me keep making these videos for free on YouTube. So, that's how we can disable plugins on specific pages. And you can do the same thing for every plug-in. And you can improve the page load speed at least a little bit, probably on every single page on your website. If you got value from this video, make sure you like and subscribe to let me know. Then check out this video right here, which shows you how to speed up your website using the light speeded plugin. That'll increase your site speed substantially, especially when combined with what you learned in this video. So, check out that video and I'll see you