Hello, @lejoungphally

You can easily disable the W3-Total-Cache plugin using the WP-Cli tool from the command line. We have an article that can help you get familiar with the tool which you can check here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-wp-cli-v2-to-manage-your-wordpress-site-from-the-command-line

You can navigate to the Activating and Deactivating Plugins part of the tutorial.

To list all of your plugins navigate to your WordPress install directory and execute:

wp plugin list

To reactivate any plugin execute:

wp plugin deactivate w3-total-cache

The other option will be to rename the W3-Total-Cache directory in your wp-content/plugins folder, but this can be used as a last resort option due to the fact it can mess up the database or not actually disable the plugin successfully.

Hope that this helps!
Regards,
Alex

Hi @lejoungphally,

I’ll recommend using wp-cli. wp-cli is a tool that helps you manage your WordPress website from your terminal. It can activate/deactivate plugins and themes + it can check your website for any potential issues, create new users and so on.

I’ll urge you to check it out here:

https://wp-cli.org/

It has documentation on how you can use it and how to install it.

Additionally, you can check DigitalOcean’s tutorial on the mater here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-wp-cli-v2-to-manage-your-wordpress-site-from-the-command-line

It’s explained pretty good on how to use it.

For your example, you can try something like

wp plugin deactivate w3-total-cache

Anyway, see if that helps.