BugWP logo BugWP
Back to Community
Home / Community / Plugin → Code snippets

Why Your Code Snippets Might Still Be Running After Deactivation

30 threads Sep 16, 2025 Plugin → Code snippets

Content

It's a common and often confusing scenario: you deactivate or even delete a snippet in the Code Snippets plugin, but its effects stubbornly remain on your website. This can be particularly alarming if the snippet was causing a problem or a security issue. Based on community reports and troubleshooting, this guide will walk you through the most likely reasons and how to resolve them.

Why This Happens

The Code Snippets plugin executes code from its own interface. When a snippet is deactivated or the plugin is entirely deleted, it should cease to function immediately. If the code's effects persist, the cause is almost always external to the plugin itself. The most common culprits are caching, a duplicate code source, or a need to rebuild optimized files.

Common Solutions

1. Clear All Caching Layers

This is the most frequent cause of this issue. Caching systems store a copy of your website's pages to serve them faster to visitors. If a page was cached while a snippet was active, the cached version will continue to show the snippet's effects until the cache is cleared.

  • Object Caching: Clear any object caching (e.g., Redis, Memcached) from your hosting control panel or caching plugin.
  • Page Caching: Clear the cache in your caching plugin (e.g., LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache).
  • CDN Cache: If you use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare, purge its cache.
  • Browser Cache: Clear your own browser's cache and perform a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5 on Windows, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac).

2. Check for Duplicate Code

The snippet's code might exist in more than one place on your site. A thorough search is necessary.

  • Theme's functions.php: The code may have been manually added to your theme's functions.php file.
  • Other Plugins: Another plugin might be injecting similar or identical code. Deactivate other plugins one by one to see if the behavior stops.
  • Other Snippet Managers: Ensure you aren't running a second snippet management plugin.

3. Optimized File Rebuild (Less Common)

Some advanced caching and optimization plugins create highly optimized versions of CSS and JavaScript files. If a snippet's code was included in one of these optimized files, the file may need to be regenerated. Simply saving the settings in your optimization plugin can often force a rebuild of these files.

What To Do If The Problem Persists

If you have cleared all caches and confirmed the code exists nowhere else on your site, but the behavior continues, the issue is almost certainly not with the Code Snippets plugin. The effects you are seeing must be coming from another source. It is recommended to:

  • Use your browser's "View Page Source" or developer tools to inspect the element or behavior. This can sometimes reveal which script or style is responsible.
  • Perform a full conflict test by temporarily switching to a default WordPress theme (like Twenty Twenty-Four) and deactivating all plugins except Code Snippets. If the issue disappears, reactivate them one by one to find the conflict.

By methodically working through these steps, you can almost always identify and resolve the reason a snippet's code appears to linger after it has been deactivated.

Related Support Threads Support