Question: Is there a way to completely deactivate WordPress plugins when they are not needed on a specific page (e.g. at checkout or on the blog)?

Answer:

Yes - and the fact that this question even needs to be asked reveals something fundamental about how WordPress works by default.

WordPress loads every active plugin on every request. It makes no distinction between a checkout page that needs WooCommerce, a payment gateway, and a handful of supporting plugins, and a blog post that needs none of those things. The default behavior is unconditional: everything loads everywhere, always.

There are tools that attempt to address this within WordPress. Plugin Organizer and Freesoul Deactivate Plugins allow you to disable specific plugins on specific pages or post types through the WordPress admin. Asset CleanUp and Perfmatters offer similar control at the script and style level. These are legitimate tools and they help - but they all share a structural limitation: they operate inside WordPress, which means the full WordPress bootstrap has already happened before any selective loading logic can take effect.

In other words, they reduce what runs after WordPress starts. They cannot reduce what WordPress itself costs to start.

That distinction matters more than it might initially appear. The bootstrap itself - loading core, initializing hooks, preparing the plugin infrastructure - carries a fixed cost that conditional loading tools inside WordPress cannot touch. For high-traffic sites, complex WooCommerce installations, or pages with many concurrent uncached requests, this baseline cost is often where the real performance problem lives.

The more fundamental approach is to control plugin loading before WordPress boots - intercepting the request early enough that unnecessary plugins are never handed to WordPress in the first place.

LiteCache Rush operates at exactly this level. Rather than disabling plugins after WordPress has already initialized, Rush determines the appropriate plugin set for each request before the bootstrap begins. A blog post request receives only the plugins that blog posts actually require. A checkout request receives only what checkout genuinely needs. Everything else is prevented from loading entirely - not suppressed after the fact, but never executed at all.

The result is not just fewer plugins running on certain pages. It is a fundamentally lighter WordPress execution for every request where unnecessary plugins would otherwise have loaded by default.