Yes, I know I've written it many times
The best and lightest plugin is the one you don't use, but sometimes we can't find, or there is no alternative to solve certain problems and we have no choice but to resort to an add-on.
However, we can always try to use a plugin that once it has fulfilled its mission, we can uninstall it.
This is a small selection of those plugins to use and "throw away". They are the most common and with the exception of Broken Link Checker they are all fairly lightweight and leave little or no trace after uninstallation.
Health Check & Troubleshooting is a useful classic for anyone who has ever had to deal with a bug. It allows you to disable (administrator only) all plugins and use the default template to activate plugins one by one until you find the culprit .
Query Monitor is a debugging tool to find PHP errors, hooks and actions, scripts and stylesheets in queue, HTTP API calls, Ajax API calls and other things. Highly recommended for troubleshooting and debugging problems such as slow database queries.
Code Profiler measures the performance of your plugins and templates at the PHP level to quickly find any potential problems. Very easy to use. You can measure specific pages and save logs with the results. Once the problem is found and fixed you can uninstall it.
Wp Crontrol. Allows you to see and control what happens in the WP-Cron system and, among other things, edit, delete and execute immediately any cron event. Indispensable to stop those lame tasks that may be slowing down your site. With WP-Cron Status Checker you can also check which tasks are running after disabling WordPress WP-Cron.
Better Search Replace allows you to search for and replace any text in any content in WordPress. You can, for example, search for unused shortcodes to remove them or rectify spelling mistakes in bulk. Be careful with its use. The applied changes are irreversible, so remember to always have a full backup before using it.
Broken Link Checker. Does just what its name says, it monitors and tests all internal and external links for broken links. Removing broken links improves SEO and user experience. It is advised to be careful with this plugin, don't forget to uninstall it immediately after the cleanup because it is a resource killer. It can be used in addition to other online broken link checkers.
Regenerate Thumbnails although this plugin has not been updated for two years it still fulfils its mission. It allows you to regenerate all lost thumbnail sizes for one or more images that have been uploaded to your media library. Especially useful when you switch templates and find missing images. Some more info on how to use it.
Perfomance Lab allows you to test optimisation proposals that will most likely become part of WordPress core. Be warned that this is a plugin with some beta testing. The modules that are not marked as "experimental" should work on a production site, but it is recommended to play with these modules in a test environment. + Info.
