Speaker 1: Hey, this is Will Middleton from Lifter LMS. In this video I'm gonna talk about troubleshooting in Lifter LMS and these tips will also apply to WordPress in general So even if you're not using a Lifter LMS website Stay tuned and you might pick up some good tips for troubleshooting your site. Troubleshooting is just the process of figuring out what's going wrong and getting that solved So let's dive in to our documentation here I'll just do kind of a video overview on our documentation here The first thing we want to check for is plugin and system updates. Whenever you see an issue on your website, you'll always want to make sure that all your products are up-to-date. On the WordPress dashboard, under WP Admin on your website, under Dashboard there's this Updates tab. I'm sure you're familiar with it. Whenever you see an issue, make sure that all your plugins, themes, and updates available are performed here. A lot of times when there's a bug, it might be caused by an older version of a product on your website causing an issue because the code is old or there may be an update that that plugin has released to fix the issue. So just doing updates can frequently fix issues that arise. The next thing we'll want to check is the LifterLMS documentation. If you type into Google or head to LifterLMS.com forward slash docs you'll find we have a ton of documents talking about various FAQs and conflicts and things like that just niche items that might arise. So do a quick Google search and try to find if there's any resources out there about the issue that you're currently seeing. The next step is access and 404s. So figuring out exactly what the issue is is really important to solving the issue. So a common issue on Lifter LMS websites that people see and just sites that involve logins in general is users can't log in. So they might show up on the website, purchase the course, and then their login credentials don't work. What's frequently happening here is caching. Caching is when any layer along the line between the server that your website is hosted at and the client's computer or phone or whatever that they're accessing your online core site from, there's some layer in between that is storing a copy of the website and showing that copy of the website to the user instead of just communicating with the database directly. And so it's, the reason caching exists is to make a site faster, but it can cause problems with dynamic websites like Lifter LMS websites or WooCommerce websites, because those websites are dynamic. There's different things that appear and different permissions that are present depending on whether the user is logged in or not, there's purchases happening in login. So it's not just a static blog website or a static business brochure website, it's more of a complex website. So making sure that as many caching layers are turned off as possible is usually the best recommended advice unless you're getting into caching specific pages like the home page. But you don't wanna cache pages like the student dashboard page or course pages and pages that serve dynamic content. You usually want to make sure those are not cached. So it's as seamless as possible for people to get access to the course once they purchase. But advising users to flush the cache can sometimes be useful if they're seeing an issue where they purchase a course and then can't log in. Because when they purchase the course, they're still seeing the copy of the website that was cached that was shown to them before they purchased. Even though the server knows that they've made a purchase, there's some layer in between the server and the client's computer that is showing them an older version of the website. So clearing the cache is sort of a message to the server, This is, hey, can I get an updated copy of the website? And then the user gets the updated copy, which of course they have permissions to get in. So that's just a general overview on how caching works. And so that's why we advise turning off as much caching as possible, especially if you have an early Lifter LMS website, you're getting your first hundred enrollments, caching usually is not gonna be necessary in that case. Once you start getting a ton of traffic, you'll wanna look at a product like WP Rocket, make sure you're excluding specific pages from being cached and really get that set up well. And there's speed experts in our community, freelancers, who can help you get that set up as well down the line when that becomes necessary. The next thing we'll wanna take a look at is debug logs. Debug logs are a list of, like logs on a website are basically actions that happen. and debug logs are like lists of errors that occur on the website. So we have a link about finding a debug log in LifterLMS and LifterLMS has a log. If you go to LifterLMS status logs on the back end of your website, we'll head there, LifterLMS status logs. We have this log here, which kind of talks through what's going on in Lifter LMS. And this can help us figure out what's going wrong in certain situations. So it's good to know that this exists in case it's ever relevant when contacting support to be able to provide the Lifter LMS log. That's what they're referring to here. And then there's also a WP debug log which will display whatever errors the website's encountering on various parts of your website. So sometimes you load the website and you get a white screen. You can't even access the WordPress admin. It's just like a white screen or it says critical error. That's where you'd wanna turn on WP debug log here in your WP config file. And if you're not comfortable enough going into the backend of your hosting and the file manager and adding this line of code, your website host is usually happy to help you out with this to make sure that it all goes smoothly for you. But what that's gonna do is display the error that's happening on the front end of the website so you can see clearly what's going on and copy and paste that and send it to support or whoever you're communicating with to help figure out what's going on. So it'll take that white screen and then put like a line of code. It's not code, it's usually like a file path. That's where the error is at on the top of the page. But the reason that's usually off by default is because you don't wanna usually display that publicly because your students might get confused or whatnot. If they show up on the website, it's a white screen and there's this weird line of text at the top of the page. But that weird line of text is usually useful for figuring out what's going on. So that's why we like to turn on the WP debug log in some situations with like a white screen to figure out exactly which file is causing the site to go white. The next thing we wanna take a look at is plugin conflicts. A lot of WordPress users, including a lot of users I've worked with, and I've been guilty of this at points, have installed a bunch of plugins on the website that can cause conflicts. I've seen people install a bunch of LMS tools. Maybe you've installed like Lifter LMS along with a quiz tool. There's many products in WordPress that create quizzes in WordPress, and they're looking for that forward slash quiz URL. You know, if you go to yoursite.com forward slash quiz forward slash name of quiz, there might be multiple plugins looking for that URL. So if you were having an issue with quizzes, for example, and you deactivate all your plugins other than Lyft or LMS and quizzes start to work again, it might be another quiz plugin that you have on there causing that issue. So what we usually recommend is creating a staging copy of your website. A staging copy of a website is usually provided from website hosts where you can just click a button called like create a staging site and it'll create a copy of your website. It's not your live website. It'll be like staging1.yoursite.com and it just has an exact copy of everything you have but you can experiment on that staging website and make breaking changes that'll break that website and it doesn't matter because it's not your live website, it's just the staging website and those are usually very nice for troubleshooting. And of course that's always advised. Sometimes I just go into my live website and try to figure out the issue but it's always it advised to use a staging website just in case something breaks or you can let support companies into it. Like if you're contacting Lifter LMS support, you can provide access to that staging website and not worry about taking down your live website during the time that we're troubleshooting an issue. So the reason I brought up staging websites is that what I like to do is deactivate all all the plugins and then just activate Lifter LMS and Lifter LMS products you're using and then see if the issue goes away. And then if it does go away, you know that it's a plugin conflict. So then you can turn on plugins one by one and figure out which plugin was causing that conflict. And once you know which plugin is causing the conflict, it's a lot easier to solve because then we can really dive into what exactly in this plugin is causing the problem and usually get things sorted out from there. So plugin conflicts are important to check for. And then theme compatibility is the exact same thing. If you change to like the WordPress 2021 theme temporarily, advised to do this on a staging website. But usually I just do it on the live website because it only takes a second, but of course that's always advised that you do the best practice of creating a staging copy of the website. But yeah, theme conflicts are the same thing. So just switch to a default WordPress theme if you're seeing some sort of issue. And if the issue goes away, you know it's related to the theme. So really isolating with themes and plugins, if it's a theme or plugin conflict, is what I usually like to do first, depending on what the issue is. And that'll really narrow it down. Is this issue related to a theme? Is this issue related to a plugin? Determining that is the first thing that I usually do in troubleshooting. And then of course, submit a support ticket. We do have a guide on submitting support tickets, how to submit the best support ticket with Lifter LMS. We have a link to that here and a video on that as well. Just what information that you can provide that'll help you solve the problem the fastest. And all these steps above, if you do these steps on your site when troubleshooting, before submitting a support ticket, you will probably solve 90% of the issues before even submitting a ticket. But if it does come to submitting a ticket, check out that guide on submitting a great ticket. We have another video on that about what information that you can include, like admin logins, a video of what's going on, a screenshot of what's going on, recreation steps, like step one, do this, step two, do this, step three, you'll see the issue. Just a couple of best practices for submitting tickets to any company to help solve the problem the fastest. But that is a guide on troubleshooting with LFTR LMS, checking for all the potential issues and ultimately submitting a ticket. If you're still stuck, our support team would be happy to help. Yeah, that's it for this video. My name is Will Middleton from Lifter LMS. Thanks for joining me in this video and I'll see you in the next one.