Widget area becomes unusable when Posts in Sidebar is Active

Hello @dianne92,
it’s not simple to target the exact reason of this behavior, but we can try.

1) Which WordPress version are you using?
2) Which Posts in Sidebar version are you using?
3) How many Posts in Sidebar widgets are active when you load the widgets page?
4) If you disable (not uninstall) Posts in Sidebar plugin, could you confirm that you do not see any slow loading of the widgets page?

Let me know, please.

Hi Aldo,

1. WordPress 5.1.1
2. Version 4.7.6
3. I have disabled the Posts in Sidebar now and trying to build myself a different solution but I think I have something like 15 as I am using Custom Sidebars plugin and for ~ 15 posts I had custom sidebars, each one holding one different Posts in Sidebar widget.
4. Yes, I can confirm that upon disabling the plugin the issue goes away and just to be sure I tested this with Content Aware Sidebars that provides the same functionality as Custom Sidebars and got the same result – hanging when used along with Posts in Sidebar.

Bottom line, the issue seems to be that I am using too many Posts in Sidebar widgets at a time but this is what I want, a way to customize the sidebar for each of my posts (not for all of them but for some).

The weird thing is that until some time ago this worked well and I had no issues using this configuration. Moreover, on the frontend everything looks and feels as it should, just the widgets administration page hangs to the point that I cannot do anyhting.

Hope it helps

Hi Dianne,
first of all, thank you for your report.

I made multiple tests and tried adding more than 25 widgets in a series of widgets area created with Custom Sidebars. The time required for displaying the page is 5 seconds. The tests have been made on a my local test server. OK, it’s not a real webserver, but the response time is acceptable for this number of widgets. So, I wonder if the problem is in the webserver that you’re using. But it’s only an hypothesis.

A possible test could be trying to disable all the plugins, leaving active only Posts in Sidebar, in order to understand if another plugin is incompatible with all these instances of Posts in Sidebar.

I understand that my plugin is complex, and it has to do with a lot of options. Perhaps even this could be the cause of this issue, when the plugin makes a lot of widgets.

The weird thing is that until some time ago this worked well and I had no issues using this configuration.

Do you remember a date after which the plugin started to cause this behavior? If we find the exact version that introduced the problem, I can try to find a solution (if possible).

Thanks for your time. ??

Let me know, please.