Identifying where plugins are being used in your wordpress install

Question

I've inherited an existing wordpress installation and there are several plugins (active and inactive) that I'm unfamiliar with and unsure if they're even still being used in any fashion. Once I see that they're not being used at all, I plan to delete them.

Do you have any tips or ways to automatically test if any content using these plugins (and if so, identifying where), without deactivating each, one by one, and examining different pages or the dashboard?

I'm thinking something like searching for plugins' shortcode(s) in my posts tables?

Answer 1

This would be impractically to automate due to nearly endless amount of ways which constitute plugin "use". What plugins do range from super obvious to extremely subtle and niche.

Some plugins specialize in changing behavior to not do something, making their functionality consist of absence rather than presence of results.

If I absolutely needed a starting point I would dump get_included_files() and check against plugin folders to have a rough guess which stuff is actively loaded. But that would only serve as rough outlook.

Overall I don’t think you can be off the hook for actually examining what the active plugins are and what their purpose is, then handling case by case.