WC Admin Pages slow, unresponsive and return “Error retrieving settings”
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Several WooCommerce page loading issues
Page load times in WooCommerce Admin are generally a minimum of 30 seconds and sometimes fail to load.
I have taken numerous usual steps to identify the root cause that I can explain as required.
The initial issue that caused me to begin troubleshooting, is that Elementor page builder is slow to load a page when opened for editing, or more often, fails to load completely. On occasions this causes the whole site to become unresponsive for a few minutes before returning. When this happens, an increase in memory use is observed (on the recently upgraded infrastructure).
After various attempts to identify the cause, I noticed the Elementor issue is significantly worse when WooCommerce is enabled. That is, without Woo, the page loads slowly (eg 30 seconds), with Woo it usually fails (eg page load of 90 seconds or greater or failure to load at all).
This lead me to further review WooCommerce and related plugins (Payments, Shipping, Square) where the following issues have been observed.
Theme in use is ‘Bridge’ by Qode Interactive – and yes, I can reproduce the error on twenty twenty-three. I’ve also checked in with them first to make sure there’s nothing obvious from a Theme point of view. They have cart.php page to update soon but say that will not be related to this issue. Issues can also be reproduced on a clean install of WP and minimal suite of plugins.
I realise there may be some other underlying root cause for the slow performance, and that the various issues mentioned may be unrelated, but I’m starting here with WooCommerce as there are several broken items and the performance is significantly worse with it enabled.
WooCommerce related issues
Menu item: WooCommerce / Home
“There was an error getting your inbox. Please try again.”
Of course, trying again yields the same result
Menu item: Customers
Long page load time around 60-90 seconds, customer table outline renders then page fails with error “There was an error getting your stats. Please try again.”
Menu item: Payments, Payments Tab, WooPayments, Manage
Error briefly pops up in black box at lower left of screen
“Error retrieving settings”
Page renders but no settings are populated. Re-populating and saving them does not fix the error
Menu item: Payments, Overview
Page sometimes does not render or slowly renders with these errors
Errors briefly pops up in black box at lower left of screen
“Error retrieving all deposits overviews”
“Error retrieving all deposits”
Menu item: Analytics
All charts fail with error
“There was an error getting your stats. Please try again.”
I’ve have a status report available and can load that up if required
WP version 6.3
PHP Version 8.1.19
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Hi Roxy,
Thanks again for taking the time to help with this.
I’ve tested a few things but the short story is, the page load time has improved a little but the errors are all still there.
I have Test, Staging and Production instances running.
Test is a fresh installation with no new content and just the minimum WP, Theme, WC setup. On this, after deleting WC the page load times improve (but as there is no content it’s not the real test of this), with WC re-installed the purple-triangle errors are there immediately.
On Staging, there is a full replica of production content and settings are almost identical, the same thing happens, delete all WC and related plugins, page load time improves (Elementor edit page goes from around 70-90 seconds down to perhaps 30-40, so still not good).
Production, same results as Staging (on Bridge and Twenty Twenty-Three Themes).
While doing this test, in production, I deleted WooCommerce, WooCommerce Payments, WooCommere Shipping and Tax, WooCommerce Square, Jetpack, Jetpack Without Promotions. When reinstating things, I have only put back WooCommerce and WooCommerce Square as I have an account with Square. It was an opportunity to remove the WC Payments and therefore the Jetpack bloat. It hasn’t fixed anything, perhaps page load times have improved a bit, but glad to be rid of all that extra clutter.
…so, yes there are errors in the browser console https://snipboard.io/pkDvem.jpg
Do you think it may be a wp installation location issue? guychapman.net/wp/ is where it is located but those links in the errors don’t have that path. Also, lots of chatter about similar issues in here https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce-admin/issues/3943 but unresolved.
Cheers,
GuyHi Roxy,
Looking at some of the errors in the previous snipboard image, and trying some of the urls in them, I get the following if it is of any use. Listed for three of them is the Console error, the error from opening the url in the browser, and the text on result page when visiting that url.
So the console error shows a server 503 not available and json has a status of 401 not authorised.
[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 () (low-in-stock, line 0)
https://guychapman.net/wp-json/wc-analytics/products/low-in-stock?page=1&per_page=1&low_in_stock=true&status=publish&_fields%5B0%5D=id&_locale=user
{"code":"woocommerce_rest_cannot_view","message":"Sorry, you cannot list resources.","data":{"status":401}}[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 () (reviews, line 0)
https://guychapman.net/wp-json/wc-analytics/products/reviews?page=1&per_page=1&status=hold&_embed=1&_fields%5B0%5D=id&_locale=user
{"code":"woocommerce_rest_cannot_view","message":"Sorry, you cannot list resources.","data":{"status":401}}[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 503 () (orders, line 0)
https://guychapman.net/wp-json/wc-analytics/orders?page=1&per_page=1&status%5B0%5D=processing&status%5B1%5D=on-hold&_fields%5B0%5D=id&_locale=user
{"code":"woocommerce_rest_cannot_view","message":"Sorry, you cannot list resources.","data":{"status":401}}Also, you asked if the issue happens in a separate browser and yes it is in macOS Safari and Firefox and in Safari private browsing. No browser extensions enabled.
Cheers,
GuyHi @guychapman
From the details you’ve provided, it seems like there are two main issues at hand: the server responding with a status of 503, and the JSON responses indicating a 401 unauthorized status.
A 503 error generally indicates that the server is temporarily unable to handle the request. This could be due to the server being overloaded or down for maintenance. It’s worth checking with your hosting provider to see if there are any known issues or maintenance windows that might be causing this.
Your server logs may provide more details about the 503 error. You can usually access these through your hosting control panel or by contacting your hosting provider.
The 401 unauthorized status in the JSON responses suggests that there are some permission issues. The error message “woocommerce_rest_cannot_view” means that the user trying to access these resources doesn’t have the necessary permissions. This may be due to incorrect settings in your WooCommerce or WordPress setup, or it could be related to user roles and capabilities.
Can you please ensure that the user role has the necessary capabilities to view and manage WooCommerce resources? You can check this in WordPress by navigating to Users > All Users and clicking on the user in question.
If everything looks fine and still loading issue persists, would you mind enabling HPOS? You can do this by heading over to WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Data storage for orders.
I also suggest moving the WordPress core to root from the subfolder and testing whether it resolves the permission and speed related issues.
Lastly, it’s worth checking if there’s a conflict with another plugin or the theme. You can do this by deactivating all other plugins and switching to a default theme like Storefront, then checking if the issue persists. If it doesn’t, reactivate each plugin one by one, checking each time if the issue reoccurs. This process will help you identify if a specific plugin or theme is causing the issue.
I hope this helps! Please let us know how it goes or if you need further assistance.
Thanks!
Hi Shameem,
Thanks for that information, I’ve gone through it and tried those suggestions, notes below…
Re the 503 errors in the browser console, I’ve checked server logs and performance at the time of loading the Woo pages and there is nothing logged. Other areas of the solution are working correctly (although slow, which is what this ticket is about). I’ve recently upgraded the hosting to move off shared infra onto VPS. These errors reported in the browser console are all Woo-specific too, not across other functions.
Checked the user role but it’s a single admin user site. Same one that installed and configured everything so I don’t think there is anything I can modify there either.
I enabled HPOS and re-tested but stil get the same errors and poor page load times.
I’ve moved WP on the test site to root but still get the errors.
and finally, on the plugin testing, I’ve gone through numerous rounds of that across Production, Staging and Test with various combinations of plugins and themes on and off. Everything points back to Elementor being bloated but it functions until WooCommerce is enabled, then the page load time degrades by another 30-60 seconds and Elementor pages fail to load. I suspect Elementor is just the canary-in-the-coalmine, as it’s so bloated, it’s probably the first thing to reveal the failures.
… so still a bit stuck, and not even sure the browser console errors in Woo relate to the poor performance, there could be a couple of things going on here. Open to any other ideas though,
Despite all that, still interested to work out what is causing the 401’s though, even if it doesn’t resolve the performance issue there’s something in there that needs fixing.
Thanks,
GuyHi Saif, @babylon1999,
Yes, frustrating but most interactions have helped at least eliminate possible causes and in some cases improve performance a little.
The same original issues remain, slow page loads and browser console errors with ‘…/wp-json/wc-…’ in the path.
The server returns what is probably a generic 503 but I suspect that is in response to the 401 returned by WC (visible when running some of those json links in the browser…
{"code":"woocommerce_rest_cannot_view","message":"Sorry, you cannot list resources.","data":{"status":401}}I’ll raise something with Elementor but working towards that. Started with Infrastructure, then the theme company, now Woo, next Elementor…
I’ve tried different PHP versions on the test instance that has the error out of the box on a vanilla installation. I’m on 8.1 and going up to 8.2 or down through various versions all return the same error results.
I’d be interested to know if you have anyone who can dig into the source of the 401 errors from json/rest.
Cheers,
Guy
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