Plugin keeps deactivating

Hi @chillifish,

Sorry to hear you’ve been encountering the plugin deactivating. What may be happening is a third party plugin could be changing your SALT keys, which would result in you becoming disconnected. So we can determine more on this and provide you with the most appropriate troubleshooting suggestions, please share the following:

1. Your Site Health information. You can use this form to share privately if preferred.??
2. When you mention the plugin is deactivating, what is the full error you see on the Site Kit dashboard? For example, are you asked to “Redo plugin set up” only to encounter the same the following day?

Once we have the above we can advise on this further. Thank you!

Hi, thanks for coming back so quickly. Have filled in the form.

I’m not getting any error on the dashboard, I just log into my site and the Site Kit plugin has been deactivated. When I reactivate everything comes up fine and is set up as it should be.

Thanks.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 12 months ago by Chillifish.

Many thanks for sharing these additional insights @chillifish. As I don’t spot anything unusual with your setup, let’s perform a couple of checks.

Firstly, can you check if you’re instantly disconnected after logging out of your site and logging back in? I can see you’re connected at present, so please login and check whether you remain connected. If you happen to become disconnected, there may be a notice suggesting that you need to re-authenticate your Google account. If any such notice appears, please share this here.

Secondly, if you are not disconnected at after logging in once more, do you recall whether you’re asked to login daily or after particular intervals? I ask as there may be a security feature at host level that is changing your WordPress SALT keys daily. Changing these keys will result in you having to set up the plugin once more. If this is the case, we can apply Site Kit constants so you do remain connected.

Let me know if you have any questions with the above.

Hi James, logging out doesn’t seem to make a difference. I logged in and out a few times yesterday (and have just again to check). I’m asked to login every time I try and access the dashboard, even if I check ‘keep me logged in’.

That said, I have exactly the same setup with quite a few other sites on the same host with no issues with Site Kit deactivating.

Thanks for the update @chillifish.

logging out doesn’t seem to make a difference.

By that I assume that you’re disconnected from Site Kit after logging out? Can you share a recording of your experience and we can investigate this further. Within the recording, please demonstrate the following:

1. You setting up Site Kit
2. Logging out of the site
3. Logging back in once more, with the plugin now disconnected.

I ask the above as I’d like to see what notice if any appears on the Site Kit dashboard after you’re disconnected. You can use a service such as Loom or RecordIt to share a screen recording, while using the same form previously used to share this privately.?

Once we have this we can propose some troubleshooting suggestions, which may include troubleshooting your third party plugins.

Hi, sorry for the delay, I was waiting until it happened again and I’ve think I’ve got to the bottom of it. I’m not sure why it happens, but I now know when it happens.

The site is hosted with Siteground and it happens whenever I deploy any files from the staging site to the live site. I don’t know why as the files are entirely unrelated to Site Kit, most often it’s only the theme CSS file.

I just have to remember to re-activate Site Kit after I deploy any staging files.

Nice troubleshooting @chillifish! What may be happening is the SALT keys, upon each push to the live site, may be updated. I can’t be sure, but if that is the case I’d be happy to provide you with instructions on applying Site Kit specific constants, similar to the below:
define( 'GOOGLESITEKIT_ENCRYPTION_KEY', 'uniqueKeysHere' );
define( 'GOOGLESITEKIT_ENCRYPTION_SALT', 'uniqueKeysHere' );

The above will ensure that Site Kit doesn’t use your standard WordPress SALT keys, which in your cases may be changing, resulting in you disconnecting from the plugin. You can check if your SALT keys are changing by reviewing your wp-config file on your staging and live site.

I can keep this support topic open if you wish, while you check.

Unfortunately, having looked at it, the SALT keys are identical on staging and live, so I’m not sure that will work. Happy to give it a try though…

Thanks for the update. If you find the same happens upon each push from staging to live it may be related to Site Kit connected with one URL on staging, with the URL then changing when it’s on the live site. This is expected if you have Site Kit set up on the staging site, on a different URL to your live site. When Site Kit recognizes a URL changes, it will state so within your WordPress dashboard. Feel free to share a screenshot of what you see after disconnecting, so I can confirm that this is the case.

Hi James, I have recorded a loom and shared it using the above form. I have Site Kit deactivated on the staging site.

Many thanks for sharing the recording @chillifish, very useful to see what’s occurring. It looks like you remained connected in this recording, where you only selected some theme files to be pushed to production.

As Site Kit should be only active on a live site due to Google requiring access to a publicly accessible site in order to check the tags and connect with Search Console, I suspect that when you are disconnected, this may be more of an issue with the application used to migrate files. For example if you set up Site Kit on a staging site, the URL (which Site Kit connects with) will differ from your live site URL. Normally Site Kit (if set up on the staging site) will recognize a URL change and it will ask you to redo plugin setup. In your case, it looks like you can choose what files and templates to migrate, which may be complicating the URL change detection within Site Kit.

To troubleshoot this further, can you ensure Site Kit is reset on your stating site URL if you do have it set up on there? This means not only deactivating the plugin on your staging site, but resetting on the staging Site Kit. The plugin should only be active on your site live site. I suspect that if you keep Site Kit active only on your live site it may remain connected. You may need to ensure that the Site Kit plugin files are skipped when pushing an update to your live site. I haven’t tested the Siteground migration tool, but I’m happy to investigate this as far as I can if issues remain.

As we didn’t receive a response I’ll mark this as resolved. Feel free to open a new support topic if you continue to encounter issues, or reopen this topic and we’d be happy to assist.