You have created a new product feed configuration, but the processing of the product feed gets stuck. You keep seeing a blinking status message saying “processing (91%)” – or any other percentage – which is not increasing for hours.
In most cases this is caused by the WP-cron being disabled.
What is WP-cron?
Read the excellent, yet nerdy, article about the WP-cron in WordPress Handbook: what is WP-cron
Why is the WP-cron so important for this plugin?
The plugin uses the WordPress Cron to process your product feed in small batches as otherwise it could cause performance issues on your website, time-out, or run out of memory. It enables WordPress users who are using a resource-limited environment (shared hosting plans) to use the plugin to create product feeds.
Sometimes hosting agencies or website owners disable usage of the WP-cron altogether which causes issues with our plugin as it will only be able to process the first batch. This is when you see the blinking processing status getting stuck.
How to check if your WP-cron is enabled
Download the WP Control plugin. Check if there is an error notification on top of the cron-events page of this plugin. When an error message is showing reach out to your hosting support desk and ask if they can enable the WP-Cron.
I have enabled the WP-cron, what’s next?
Ok, almost there!
- All you need to do now is to deactivate our plugin (do NOT delete the plugin as this will result in the lose of your configured feeds) and re-activate it again. This will reset the cron events needed for our plugin to run the batches.
- Now hit the ‘Cancel processing product feed’ button
- Refresh your browser screen
- Now hit the ‘Manual refresh product feed’ button or wait for the automated refresh to kick in.
That’s all.
Enabling the WP-cron is not an option for me:
Ok, so you really don’t want to enable the WP-cron. Alternatively, you can also trigger the WP-cron events by running a remote Unix cron. This does however have some consequences. Read about these consequences on our blog.
Too bad, this did not solve the issue yet:
Another possible reason for your feed to get stuck is when it runs into server/hosting configuration issues such as a PHP maximum execution time that was exceeded or the creation of the feed exceeding the maximum allowed CPU usage. When this happens there should be error logs about this in your WooCommerce fatal error logs. You can find those WooCommerce fatal error logs here.
When those errors are present in your error logs you can lower the batch size of our plugin so it uses less server resources which might prevent the errors from happening. Please read this tutorial about how you can change the batch size of the plugin.
