I’ve had difficulties with my WordPress not refreshing and updating the cache properly. Turns out it was a cookie problem.
Now. I don’t claim to be an expert on anything. I’m just like everyone else, I come across problems, and if I figure out what’s causing it. I like to share to help others out. The more knowledge that is shared, the easier problems become.
I’ve recently been experiencing issues with my WordPress when using it, and making posts. They weren’t major issues, just really annoying when trying to do standard functions.
Here are some of the symptoms I was experiencing
- Missing admin bar on the Magazine homepage
- Posts producing 404 errors – even when private
- Magazine home page not updating properly to show new posts
- Login redirect when trying to customize the appearance of my themes
- Cookie errors “nonce is invalid” keeps appearing
- Widgets not refreshing properly
I went through reading a couple of articles that were already posted on the Web, and there’s usually a few common causes
The most common causes, are usually the following problems
- Corrupted .htaccess files
- Cookie problems
- Theme corruption
- Corrupted cookies
There’s a few more, but off-hand I can’t remember them all. I just wanted to give some people a head start on where to look.
Now for me, the most complex problem that I wanted to work on first, was the Customisation of my appearance.
When researching, it suggests that some of the above problems can be caused by cookie problems (I’m guessing the WordPress server isn’t reading the files properly). When I was promoted to the login, it was accepting the cookie with the right password, but came back to the screen again.
My problem was caused by old passwords.
Here’s what I did to fix my problem. Which fixed all (or most) of the above problems. It actually fixed them all I think, the only one I’m not sure about is the “nonce is invalid” message. I’ll have to find the menu options I was in to see if this is fixed too
- Go to Appearance – Customize
- Click on username field – go to manage passwords
- Search for the website in the top right
- Find all the entries for my own that were old / not needed
- Click on the 3 dots, and select “remove”
- Once you’ve done this. Close the passwords screen, and try to login with the new passwords. For me this worked. It just means you will need to retype passwords that you used to use again
I think the problem was caused because I had 3 “admin” passwords for various pages on the site, and the install was becoming confused over verifying which password was which.
Once I inputted the correct one, it refreshed and I got my display back. When tested, I also noticed most of the other problems had gone too
This isn’t meant to be a long-winded solution to this article. However, the sites on other WordPress pages tell you to delete your entire cookies on your computer. This is annoying because it’s (EVERY) password. Given that I use a lot of complex passwords and rely on the password manager I don’t want to reset them all again. So I did my method above and it worked
I would suggest trying the above approach first, as I think it will fix most problems.
If you are still experiencing difficulties, here are a couple of articles you can try reading to research further. If you are unable to login to you main admin page etc. The below links can guide you on repairing it