Text widgets disappearing

  • I’ve seen variations of this post in the forums, some very recent. But, I haven’t found one with a solution or even a response.

    We have been updating all of our sites (250+) to https (with valid certificates) over the past few weeks. All of our sites are running on 4.7.4 (we update the core and plugins using Installatron) and several of our sites have been losing their text widgets. We have researched to find a correlation between sites, but none has been found.

    We assumed, at first, that changing the URL caused the issue. However, the URL changed on all of our sites, but not all of the sites lost their widgets.

    Over the last week, several of the sites have lost their widgets without any changes or updates being performed.

    I would love some suggestions as to what may be causing this issue, or, if you have experienced the same issue…letting us all know what you found and how you fixed it.

    Also wondering if the development team is entertaining any notion of improving the widget system? Transferring sites from one domain name to another seems to break them every time.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • I have moved and/or updated many sites of late also to HTTPS. I did not run into the widgets issues. That said, I used to. At some point (WP4.0? ), the widget system was improved so that when themes were switched, they no longer lost the widgets settings – but there is a caveat to that (and always will be):

    If during the process you switch themes, and one of them is using a widget area that the other does not, the widgets cannot be moved to the non-existent widget area (they get moved to the inactive widget area). Fortunately now that we have the live customizer (and proper theme support), we can preview the widgets when switching themes.

    When you move the sites, do you update them first?

    Thread Starter topzonemedia

    (@topzonemedia)

    Hi Pioneer,

    Yes, we always have our sites updated to the latest version of WP.

    Our loss of widget areas happens frequently when we move from our development server to our live server. In this case, the domain name is always changed. We run an SQL script to change the name where it exists in the database.

    Our theme is based on the loop with a few features that we put on every site. Namely, a mobile menu system.

    The last few instances of widget disappearance have happened on live sites with no recent updates or changes. This seeming randomness is what is throwing us a curve ball.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Text widgets disappearing’ is closed to new replies.

Tags