If you’re wondering why, when you input the correct password into your password form, you don’t get redirected to see the correct content, this guide will help.
There are three reasons why this could be happening:
Table of Contents
The page builder you’re using doesn’t support Passster
If your WordPress site is set up using a page builder like Divi, WPBakery, Elementor, or Beaver Builder, there may be a conflict between it and Passster.
There are a few settings you can check within Passster that should solve this problem for you:
- From your WordPress dashboard, go to Passster > Settings and click the Advanced link on the left-hand side.
- In the Usage Mode section, click the toggle button next to Unlock Mode.
- Next, customize your Cookie lifetime setting if you need to. If not, leave them as the default option.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Settings.
If you’re not using a page builder, or this method didn’t work for you, we’ll next check if you’re using a page cache plugin.
WP_Cache in wp-config.php
Depending on where you host your website, some things may be predefined in your wp-config.php file. There are hundreds of different constants that can be defined in the wp-config.php file, but I want to look at a specific one:
define('WP_CACHE', true );Once this is defined and you don’t use a caching plugin to control the cache, you will have difficulty getting Passster up and running correctly because each page/post is cached by default.
The simplest way to handle that would be to set this to false. Still, I highly recommend using a plugin like W3TotalCache instead because you want to cache your pages for faster loading times. Still, you want to exclude the cookie “passster” from it to allow getting the protected content once the correct password is provided.
For a quick test, you can deactivate it like so:
define('WP_CACHE', false );You’re using a page cache plugin
You may be using a cache plugin on your WordPress site to speed it up. Here are a few of the most common:
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
- WP-Optimize
- WP Super Cache
- Hummingbird
- WP Rocket
- Cache Enabler
These plugins use something called page cache (usually a setting you can turn off and on). This tells the server to store your page files so it can remember and then show them to the user faster.
This, however, can pose a problem to pages using Passster because the cache for that page is not automatically cleared when the form is updated.
The good news is we can fix this problem by telling the caching plugin you’re using to exclude pages from the page cache when the user has the cookie “passster”.
To do this using W3 Total Cache, take the following steps:
Note: You may have to explore your cache plugin settings to find a similar solution.
- From your WordPress dashboard, go to Performance > Page Cache and scroll down until you get to the Advanced section.
- Find the section called Rejected cookies and copy and paste: passster
- Then save your settings.
Your forms should now work. If however, you’re still having problems, your hosting provider may have page cache set up.
Your hosting provider has a page cache set up
Depending on your hosting provider and the services they offer, you may have page caching set up with them.
If this is the case, you may be able to follow similar steps to exclude pages from the page cache when the user has the cookie “passster”.
Alternatively, you should contact your hosting provider’s support to ask them if they can do it for you. Send them a link to this doc (and a link to the page with the form) if you need help explaining the situation.
Siteground
Siteground does not support the exclusion of a cookie from their caching. Instead, you need to remove the entire page that uses the protection from Passster from their caching settings. You do that by installing the following plugin: Siteground Optimizer.
WPEngine
WpEngine has a really extensive caching solution implemented. To make Passster work with WPEngine, you need to exclude the cookie “passster” from your caching settings. WPEngine has a pretty good tutorial on how to do that right here: https://wpengine.com/support/cache/#Custom_Cache_Exclusions
You use Cloudflare
If you are a Cloudflare user, you may want to check if you enabled the caching here. A couple of different settings can prevent unlocking the protected page with the cookie while using Cloudflare.
Make sure to check out the documentation on Caching with Cloudflare here.