Everything below reflects the current release (v1.0.0). From install to your first named culprit is typically under ten minutes.
You need WordPress 6.0+ on PHP 7.4+, an administrator login, and the plugin zip plus licence key from your purchase email. Sessions run in your browser against the live site — no staging copy, no maintenance mode, no visitor ever sees a test state. One honest note before you begin: the wizard finds plugin-borne problems; when the cause is elsewhere, it tells you that instead of guessing.
Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip from your purchase email, install and activate. It adds a Conflict Radar item to the admin menu and quietly installs its helper mu-plugin — the tiny component that does the session-scoped filtering. Both are removed cleanly on uninstall.
Open Conflict Radar → Licence and paste the key from your purchase email into the licence box — it's a long code starting VPC1., so paste the whole thing into the textarea rather than typing it. Keys are domain-based — no account, no phoning home.
Press New conflict session. Name the symptom in a sentence (“gallery blank on the shop page”), then pick the URL where you can see the problem. The session arms a signed, expiring test cookie in your browser — and only yours. Visitors keep receiving the full plugin stack throughout.
Each step, the wizard filters a subset of plugins in your session, shows you the test URL, and asks one question: problem still there — YES or NO? Every answer halves the suspect list, so a 30-plugin site takes about 5 steps. If you mis-click, step back and re-answer.
Three honest outcomes: a single culprit, named; a conflicting pair — the refinement tests the suspect alone and with each remaining candidate, and names both halves of the interaction; or not_plugin — the control step found the symptom survives with everything filtered, so look at the theme, server or CDN. The optional default-theme test (session-scoped, like everything else) checks the theme next.
Under Report branding, add your agency logo, name and colours plus the client's name, then generate the conflict report — print-ready HTML and a downloadable PDF with the symptom, the timestamped step ledger, the verdict and the recommendation. Then switch on the post-update canary so plugin updates get a homepage smoke check and an email naming what changed.
The screens and safeguards you'll actually live with.
The mu-plugin filters the active-plugin list only for requests carrying your signed, expiring test cookie. The real active_plugins option is never written, writes to it are short-circuited while a session is armed, and any validation failure — bad signature, expired cookie, wrong user — means zero filtering. Fail-safe by construction.
Before blaming anything, the wizard checks whether the symptom survives with every plugin filtered from your session. If it does, the verdict is not_plugin — the honest answer that saves you from replacing an innocent slider.
When the search isolates a suspect that behaves alone, the refinement re-tests it against the remaining candidates until the interaction reproduces — then names the pair. This is the case the one-by-one ritual almost never catches.
Optional and session-scoped: your session (only) swaps to a default theme so you can see whether the symptom is theme-borne. Visitors keep seeing the real theme.
The free edition keeps the verdict of your last session. Pro keeps the last 50 sessions — symptom, steps, verdict and report — so December's “didn't we fix this before?” has an answer on file.
Symptom and scope at the top, the timestamped step ledger in the middle, verdict and recommendation at the bottom, your branding throughout. Print-ready HTML and a real downloadable PDF — attach it to the invoice.
After any plugin update or activation, the canary fetches the homepage server-side, checks it still renders sanely, and emails you naming the plugin that just changed if something looks wrong. Honest scope: a server-side check of the rendered HTML, not a browser or JavaScript test.
One textarea, one Activate button. Paste the full VPC1.… key from your purchase email. The key covers the number of sites on your plan; move a site by deactivating on one and activating on another.