New Products Missing from Store

Update: The products appeared in the store sometime after midnight the same day… Maybe I’m an idiot and have the date / time thing wrong on WP but it’s set to my region and as far as I know setting a scheduled post to 12:00 means noon.

I’m beginning to thing this may be a cron issue. I activated the WP Crontrol plugin and ran all of the Woocommerce actions with a test product to see if that would make a difference and publish the unseen product. No luck. I know nothing about cron, but it sounds like it could also be server-related? My site is also low traffic. Should I look into this alternate cron option or closer at scheduled cron tasks?

Thank you in advance for your help!

From the description of the facts, I’m inclined to believe that this was due to caching issues.

I don’t think it would be a cron issue, because as you mentioned, the products were indeed published (you verified this in the backend). The products were live on the site, if you searched for them – which seems to indicate that older pages didn’t update to reflect the newly-published products – which again points to cache problems. The cache may have been

Also, don’t forget that you tried publishing a new product immediately (without scheduling it), and the same thing happened even when the Cron wasn’t involved.

So, that’s the first thing you’ll want to verify: cache features.

Do you have any caching plugins on your site? If so, disable them. Some hosts also enable caching features at the server level, which can often cause issues like this. I’d recommend getting in touch with them to verify if they have any such functionalities activated on your site.

Thank you! I think you hit the nail on the head. But I’m still a little lost on how to address the problem with my host…

I called Bluehost and tried to investigate the caching problem. I didn’t get the sense that the person on the phone knew quite what he was doing, though. He cleared the cache on the server and the product immediately showed up! But then when I tried to post a new one, it again did not appear. The Bluehost rep didn’t seem to acknowledge any caching features at the server level existed and essentially gave up on me and told me to hire a developer.

If this is a server level issue, then this is a problem only Bluehost can solve by adjusting their caching features, correct? What terminology should I use when I call Bluehost again?

Thanks again!

If this is a server level issue, then this is a problem only Bluehost can solve by adjusting their caching features, correct?

I’m afraid so, yes. And the fact that the product appeared after they flushed the cache, does seem to prove that’s where the problem is coming from.

You of course don’t want to have to do this every time you make a change on the website, so I’d strongly recommend to ask Bluehost to turn of cache for your site completely.

If it isn’t possible, then at least ask them to exclude the following pages from caching:

– Shop
– Cart
– Checkout
– My Account

Hopefully they are able to help!

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.