A blogger's nightmare.....
I want to start by apologizing for the technical problems with my blog yesterday.
If you visited my blog in the last few days, I am sure you noticed that the main blog page, along with the category pages, were displaying the entire content of each post, instead of the Image and small excerpt of text that you would normally see.
And it can be very frustrating when you have no idea what caused the problem. But nine times out of ten, most website issues arise from updates affecting your plugins or themes.
I knew that I had been making a few changes to my plugins and I also knew that Elementor Pro had just been updated as well.
Today, I want to talk to you about how to determine what can cause issues on your website and how best to determine exactly what is going on and how to logically go about fixing your troubles.
Know your Site
I can not stress enough, how important it is to keep up with your site. Just simply logging in each day and checking your dashboard can save you a lot of frustrating aggravation. On the dashboard, you will see notifications of recent updates and changes to your WordPress installation.
It is equally important to take a quick look around your site each day too. By doing this you will be able to spot issues right away and avoid losing visitors to your site and potential sales and client losses.
For the rest of the post, I am going to focus on the blog issue I had yesterday and how I determined what was actually causing the problems.
Probably the best advice I can offer is to make sure you pay attention to your WordPress dashboard and visit your site everyday.
When we installed Jetpack in the last post of Starting your Own Jewelry Business, we set our site up to automatically update our plugins.
If you have trouble keeping up with updates, you can change this setting for any of your plugins, to manual updates.
In the Navigation pane of your WordPress dashboard, hover over Jetpack and click Dashboard.
Scroll down in the work area until you see Plugin Updates and click Manage Plugins.
On this screen, you can turn automatic updates on and off.
Trouble Spotted
There are main settings in WordPress that control how your Blog posts are displayed on the main page, called your content archive. So the first thing to do is to check those settings.
Hover over Settings in the navigation pane and click on Reading in the drop down.
Under the Heading “For each Article in the Feed show”
Choose either Full Text for Summary and save changes at the bottom.
This however, did not solve my problem.
The next thing I tried was to deactivate all the new plugins I had installed recently. I checked my site again, not solved.
Because I was unsure how to rollback the Update, I began to open a Support ticket with Elementor.
During the process, you are asked if you have deactivated all your plugins and if you have tried changing your theme to a default WordPress theme.
In the Navigation pane, hover over Appearance and click on Themes.
Click on the Activate button for the Twenty Seventeen theme.
Recheck your website to see if the issue is resolved.
Mine was not, so I reverted back to my theme.
So I continued with my Support Ticket. I received an generic acknowledgement email so I decided to wait until I heard back from them.
Guess what? The rest of the day passed and I had not heard from support, so I decided to start fresh today.
Deep Dive Troubleshooting
Checking your Plugins
The first step to troubleshooting, is to check your Plugins. Yes, it is tedious work but it is very important to do it properly.
- Navigate to your Installed Plugins in your WordPress dashboard.
- One, by one deactivate your plugins.
- Make sure to check your site after each deactivation to determine if that specific plugin is the problem child.
If you deactivate all your plugins before checking your site, you will have no way of knowing which one is having issues.
To make this less time consuming, you can open your site in a separate tab of your web browser, and click refresh after deactivating each plugin.
Leave the plugins deactivated as your work through the list.
Even though I suspected the page builder update was my problem, I did not deactivate it right away.
I was afraid that by doing so I would lose all my layout elements for over 100 blog posts. So I was planning to wait until support contacted me back on my ticket.
But I did deactivate every single other plugin.
Next, I decided to see if I could figure out how to rollback the update to my page builder. Since I know there was a recent update, this was the next logical step.
Rolling Back Updates
This step is a little tricky.
Some plugin updates can be rolled back from the Installed Plugins work area of the WordPress dashboard. However, my page builder was different.
Elementor and many other plugins, will have their own options in the Navigation pane of the dashboard. First I clicked on Settings but did not find what I was looking for, so I tried the Tools section nextl.
Luckily for me, I found the Version Control tab and was able to rollback my Plugin to the previous version by using the dropdown box to choose which version I wanted and clicking reinstall.
I clicked Save changes afterwards and then rechecked my website.
Unfortunately, nothing had changed.
I really didn’t want to deactivate my Elementor page builder until hearing back from support, so I decided to check my the theme setting again,
Theme Settings
To get to your theme settings from the Navigation pane, hover over Appearances and click on Customize.
From the Customizer screen, click on theme settings.
Next I clicked on Content Archives since my issue centers around how my blog posts are displayed on my Blog and Category pages.
Low and behold, I found the settings which were causing my problems.
I changed the drop down to Entry Excerpts and checked the box for Display featured image.
From the Customizer, the changes are made in real time. So I was able to see that I solved my problems.
Make sure to click the Publish button to save the changes before exiting the customizer.
Last Steps
Now that the issue was uncovered and corrected, I had to go back and redo everything I undid during my troubleshooting.
Head back to your Installed plugins screen and reactivate all your plugins.
You will be asked to set up Jetpack but most likely your previous settings and connections will be back to normal.
Double check your website once again to make sure there are no issues.
Now because I had reverted my page builder to a previous version, the next step was to update to the newest version again and recheck the site.
Everything still A. OK….
The last thing I had to do was to reach back out to Support and fill them in on everything I had discovered and corrected.
I made sure to include the system info on both tickets so they have all the data the need to investigate the glitch.
Once again, I am really sorry for the difficulties you may have experienced over the last day or so.
But I really wanted to let you know that most issues are really easy to fix, it just takes a little time and remembering to follow the logical steps when troubleshooting.
If I can do it, so can you.
Have a great day and stay tuned for more great content coming your way this month.