Editing Product Takes a while after timeout

Hi there,

I haven’t seen this reported before. Does it behave in the same way if you try this with a different browser?

Tried it with Chrome initially. Tried it with Safari today.

Steps are:

Log in as admin
Go to Products
Edit a product (not quick edit)
Change Publishing option from ‘Visibility: Public’ to ‘Visibility: Private’
Click Update.

Sometimes the circular busy symbol doesn’t even spin–it shows up, but doesn’t move.

Hi there!

If your host isn’t seeing any errors at your end, this kind of problem might be caused by either a conflict with your theme or with another plugin.

The best way to determine if the issue is being caused by a theme and/or plugin is to temporarily switch your theme to Storefront and disable all plugins except for WooCommerce. A good way to do this is with a free plugin called Meks Quick Plugin Disabler, which will remember what plugins you currently have active so it’s easy to switch back.

If that resolves the issue, then slowly re-enable features until you find the one that’s causing the conflict.

This doesn’t happen in WooCommerce by default so it’s either your host or a conflict that’s causing the issue. You can also check your browser console to see if any errors are being reported by there which might give a clues to what’s causing it.

So do small businesses really have a second install of wordpress/woocommerce that they can try these things out on? Because with our single install, I cannot just turn off our site to check on this issue. I’d have bedlam. So the only other solution would be to have a second, mirrored install. Is that what a lot of mid-level businesses do?

Yes, a lot of people used staging/test sites, not just for WooCommerce or WordPress but websites in general.

Many hosts provide a staging service for you where they clone your site onto a “stage” where you can do testing without affecting the live version. You can ask your host about this.

If they don’t give you a staging site, we recommend using https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-staging/ or https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/duplicator/.

interesting. Okay, thanks!

So I set up a staging server with my host.

I didn’t change any of the plugins, and tested it. It worked.

Any suggestions to further test this?

If it works on staging and the site is exactly the same, then there is likely something wrong on the hosting side. I know your host said there aren’t any errors, but now you can point to your exact copy and setup on staging.

I hope they can figure out the cause for you!

The hosting site is taking care of both the hosting and the staging. So that makes it sound like it ISN’T the host (necessarily)

If it’s 100% the exact same site, what else could the difference be except something on the host? Is it using the same database or a different one?

Well, there isn’t as much network traffic on the staging server as compared with the live site. That, to me, doesn’t absolve code or hardware of the problem. But clearly, this isn’t a definitive WooCommerce problem, so I’ll keep doing some research and I’ll post back if I find it to be a clear WooCommerce bug.

Thanks for all your help, Joel!