Press harder.

September 28, 2017 7:00 PM

My brand-new Wordpress site needs some backend love. (Ohhhh yeah.) Wading into the freelance tech/design world is my waking nightmare. How do I find somebody?

WPTangerine, Codeable.io, Upwork, etc etc etc etc ... Oy vey. I need some relatively simple (so they always think) help with a coding/debugging issue on my WP site. The theme developers have been of limited use, and my hosting company (WPEngine) gave me a once-over on the infrastructure and basic install, but they can't get into the guts of the design. I have no idea where to begin looking for someone to help me out with this. (Yes, I've posted in MeFi Jobs!) Which options are best to find a one-time hire to help iron out the kinks in my site?

(Very short summary of the problem, for the curious: A few of my pages hang and won't load without being refreshed. That's the most I'll say about it here.)

posted by mykescipark to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I checked out your page c/o the MeFi Jobs link. I'm not going to throw my hat into the ring to be paid for it because Wordpress is an ugly motherfucker of a thing to troubleshoot at the best of times.

The theme looks fine except for one thing, there is an asset in the theme that's tripping up my adblocker (https://csi.gstatic.com/csi?v=2&s=mapsapi3&v3v=30.7&action=apiboot2&e=10_1_0,10_2_0&rt=main.8) which is causing the page loading to stall on an XMLHTTPRequest. Are you running an ad blocker? This is probably what's causing it. If you're using Google Analytics turn it off and see if the same thing happens.

Feel free to post results here, if I get a chance I'll come back and look at it.
posted by Talez at 7:20 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Now that I can get the pages to load I took a detailed look at the inspector. The other thing it could be is there's a Google Maps request smack in the middle that sometimes takes an eternity. Disable any of that and see if it makes any difference.
posted by Talez at 7:25 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm getting an error that says wpforms_settings isn't defined, and wpforms_settings is required by the wpforms.js script on the page. The pages that don't work, do work after clicking on other pages and returning to them without a refresh, so the variable does get instantiated at some point, but too late for the pages that need it. Try moving the declaration for wpforms_settings above wpforms.js?
posted by retypepassword at 7:28 PM on September 28, 2017

Just kidding. wpforms_settings never gets defined. It just loads after the error because it doesn't execute that code again, but I'm thinking the error blocks further loading in the first place.

Easiest solution right now is just to remove wpforms.js because you're not actually using it anyway.

Alternative solution is to make sure wpforms_settings gets inserted somewhere, somehow before wpforms.js gets loaded.
posted by retypepassword at 7:58 PM on September 28, 2017

What I would usually do in this situation would be to disable all your plugins then re-enable them one by one til you find the one that's causing the problem. Its possible there's a conflict between plugins or between your plugins, wordpress version and theme
posted by missmagenta at 1:58 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I love this place. Thanks all for the insightful answers - I think you've identified the crux of it ... and I've also found a team of WP geniuses to hammer out the problem!
posted by mykescipark at 9:47 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]