Troubleshooting Elfsight Instagram Feed

We do our best to keep things easy and painless for our users, but during an update of your plugin, or its migration to a live site some issues and conflicts can come up. In this article we will do our best to explain the reasons for the most common conflicts and issues, and explain ways of fixing them. 

If your plugin can't connect to Facebook or Instagram, doesn't display content or doesn;t display on your site's page, this could be a connection issue, or a conflict with some other element of your website. Here's how you can troubleshoot the connection or check for conflicts.

Troubleshooting the connection

• Reconnect your plugin. Connection might get broken during an update, or if any changes have taken place on the side of the account you've used to connect the plugin, and for some other minor reason. Reconnecting your plugin from the social media you've connected it to and reconnecting it might fix the issue.

• Check your access permissions and the account you've used to log in.

  This is especially important if you have several social media accounts, or manage several different Facebook pages. Sometimes we all make mistakes when we work with lots of information, so please, make sure that the account you've used to connect your plugin is the one that has the required owner/admin permissions for the page you need to feature.

• Check your account for access restrictions

  Our plugin only works with public sources, so if your account is private, or if there are any age restrictions or any other access restrictions, its content won't be displayed in your feed. To check this, you need to open your Instagram page in incognito mode.

Oops error

This error is easiest to identify, as you will recognize it by this error message in the plugin's editor: This happens in cases when the plugin's database is created incorrectly during installation or update, or runs out of storage. If this is the first case, reinstallation will fix this. So if you get this error, you need to reinstall your plugin first.

REST API

If you notice that the plugin only displays for you when you're logged in to your site's dashboard, and is not displayed for your site's visitors, the reason for this could be REST API settings on your server. Also, the following error message in your site's console, or any other error message containing rest_no_route is a clear indication of REST API configuration errors:

To fix this conflict, you need to contact your hosting provider or server administrator and request them to activate REST API for your website for both authorised and unauthorised users.

cURL library

This library is required for the correct work of our plugin, and if it's not activated on your website, this might cause certain conflicts. We have a dedicated article about cURL library, so in case of any odd behavior, you might check with your hosting provider to make sure that it's activated on your website.

URI request is too long

Some servers have a restriction for the number of characters contained in a URI request. If our plugin's request is longer than the server is allowed to interpret, the request won't get processed, and this will result in the plugin not displaying on your site's page. This reason is somewhat difficult to diagnose, but if you see error 414 in your site's console in connection with our plugin, you should check for this restriction with your server administrator or hosting provider.

Plugin requests are blocked by your server's firewall

If the plugin breaks or displays an error message during the connection process, at the stage when it's just connecting to Facebook or Instagram, this could be an indication that the plugin is getting blocked by your server's firewall. This issue is also hard to detect on your own, but here's an example of where you can see it in your site's console:

 If you see this message, you need to contact your hosting provider and request them to add our plugin's requests to your firewall's exceptions.

I've checked, what's next?

If you've checked for all these conflicts, and none apply to your case, our development team will be happy to take it from here. Please start a conversation in our Support Center, and our team will be delighted to assist!