This blog’s hosting company recently solved a problem I was seeing. But I then received an annoying piece of tech support advice!
I noticed some sluggishness on the “backend” of this site recently. The backend refers to the portions of the website that the site owner sees but that visitors generally don’t. After filing a support ticket, I heard back from their team quickly. They resolved the issue and suggested a course of action to prevent it from happening in the future. Then they offered one of two pieces of tech support advice I just hate.
I’ve worked in television for more than 30 years. I learned fairly quickly that the two most common pieces of TV engineering suggestions are “Turn it off and back on again” and “Unplug it and plug it back in.” Those strategies can work once in a while. But if those two steps solved all problems, we’d have no need for engineers.
And believe me: television needs its engineers. The equipment is intricately more complex than that.
When it comes to the web, web gurus have developed at least two pieces of tech support advice that irritate me everytime I hear them:
1. Clear your browser cache.
Ok, I get it: Clearing your browser cache can solve certain problems.
For one thing, when you clear your browser cache, you potentially increase the browser’s speed. Those files it was storing that it no longer need inevitably slowed things down.
But if you’re experiencing a problem with a website, clearing the cache can help you narrow it down to one of two possibilities: If clearing the cache makes the website load properly, the problem was likely your browser. If clearing the cache has no effect on the website problem, the issue might be the site itself.
Your IT people might suggest you clear cookies as well. Sometimes they can clutter things up.
But clearing the cache — along with cookies — can also log you out of every site you’re signed into. If you have a busy day at work and your IT people tell you to clear your cache, beware. You’re going to get a lot busier because you’re going to have to sign back in on everything, wasting even more time!
The other problem I have with the “clear the cache” suggestion is that I can’t tell every one of my users to be sure to clear their cache when something goes wrong. As a tool to diagnose whether the problem I’m seeing is my browser of the website, I understand the need for that test. But if doing so rules out the browser as being the problem, fixing the website has to require something more than that!
2. Deactivate all plugins.
When I contacted this blog’s hosting company to raise concerns about some sluggishness behind the scenes, they quickly checked things out. About an hour later, things had improved dramatically.
But they told me that despite their efforts to clear out a lot of errors that sprang up, the problem seemed to be one or more plugins. They didn’t know for sure at that point which plugin or plugins caused the hangups.
That’s when they offered that other annoying piece of tech support advice: Deactivate all of your plugins and then reactivate one by one to see if you can isolate a problem.
I’m surprised how often tech support teams tell bloggers to do that. I imagine that in many cases, deactivating plugins don’t cause problems.
But I’ve blogged for more than 20 years now. So I know that there are some plugins that have to be running. If you deactivate a plugin a theme requires, for example, it can break the site. I’ve seen one deactivated plugin turn a site inaccessible even for the website owner! The hosting company had to step in, roll out a backup of the site so that all of the plugins would be back up and running. But depending on how old the backup is, you could lose newer content that way!
So just turning all of them off wasn’t going to be a valid option.
Fortunately, they corrected a problem with an error log that allowed me to trace plugins that might have been causing at least some of the errors. It turns out there were four plugins that were primarily to blame. I realized I could easily deactivate all but one without any issues.
I had to check on the fourth one to make sure it was only recommended and not required.
Disabling those four seems to have solved the problem. I am monitoring a few things to make sure there aren’t additional errors occurring. I may have to deactivate another plugin or two. But I’m trying to hold off on that for now.
Still, deactivating all of them at once might have caused enough of a problem that you might not be reading this post at all!
It’s not that these two instructions are terrible in and of themselves. It’s just that they can cause additional problems as they solve a primary one.
You have to be as determined to adjust for the new problems just as much as you’re determined to solve the problem that prompted those suggestions!