StartTag: invalid element name

I have additionally now done some troubleshooting by disabling all plugins except WooCommerce and Cusrev and I still get the issue with the broken reviews xml feed

Hi,

Thanks for using CusRev.

Can you please share your feed URL?

Hi thanks for response.

here is feed url https://www.headsandtailsjewellery.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/cr/product_reviews.xml

Please try to deactivate all plugins except CusRev, WooCommerce and switch to a standard theme of WordPress. Then go to admin area > Reviews > Google > Re-save settings to re-generate the feed and see how it goes.

After many hours of troubleshooting this issue and researching I found what the issue was. A customer placed a & symbol within their review which the xml feed could not process.

It’s inevitable that some customers will use a special character in their review. Is there no way of stopping these before they get put into the xml feed which break it? I have lost a lot of time and money from Google ads revenue drops not having my reviews feed working.

Thanks

Hi,

I don’t see that issue on my demo site. The special character will be converted to HTML entity &, screenshot https://imgur.com/IBnMsTl

Thanks for your response. It appears the reviews feed is broken again with same error after it the next time it updated 24 hours later, so it looks like the & symbol was unrelated. Any further advise would be appreciated thanks

Sorry, it is difficult for us to provide further advice because we do not manage your website. Could you please let us know what did you change on your website before the XML feed stopped working again?

There was no further change. I deleted the & within a review and re-ran the feed which it then worked but it sounds like this was a coincidence. The review feed is then set to automatically updated every 24hours which it then stopped working again.

Do you have any idea what the error means?

error on line 1 at column 2: StartTag: invalid element name

Thanks

Thanks for providing additional information. The error means that the XML file wasn’t fully created. If it worked but then stopped working, something must have changed. Please try to identify what could it be. You can also try to re-generate the XML feed manually by going to the “Google” page in the plugin’s menu and pressing “Save” button. After that, please refresh the page to check the progress of creation of the XML feed.

Does the plugin require WP Cron to run? I am using server cron which is not a recent change and the product feed has run in the past using this. Just I see a notification saying “XML Feeds might not be created correctly because WP Cron is disabled“

You mention “The error means that the XML file wasn’t fully created” – Please could you provide some possible reasons on why the XML file was not created. This may help me to fix this issue. Thanks

Thanks for providing additional information. The plugin doesn’t require WP Cron to run but it requires WP Cron to create XML feeds for Google Shopping. Could you please let me know if you were able to to re-generate the XML feed manually by going to the “Google” page in the plugin’s menu and pressing “Save” button?

Thanks for your response. I decided to test if using Server Cron instead of the default WP Cron was causing the issue and it was. I could see the feed was processing using server cron but clearly running into an issue. I switched to Wp Cron and manually re ran the feed with no issues.

Ok, thanks for letting us know. If the XML feed is successfully created with WP Cron, then the next step is to troubleshoot the server cron job. Please ensure that it provides the same functionality as the standard WP Cron.