Duplicate orders, zero dollar orders, and very slow checkout process
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For the past week and a half, we’ve been getting duplicate orders, orders that get stuck in “pending payment”, zero dollar orders, and also a very long delay before the checkout page goes to the order confirmation page after payment. Nothing particular changed around that time that I can think of, unless WordPress had some mandatory auto update or something.
The technician that runs the server has spent days trying to fix these problems, using debug mode as well as two plugins to assist in tracking down issues: Code Profiler and WP Crontrol.
He tracked down a problem with WordPress’s “Cron” function, and so he replaced it with an earlier version of Cron (from WordPress two versions ago, for reasons he would understand but I do not). This partially solved the slowness issue of the checkout page: instead of a minute and a half, it’s now only about a minute to get to the confirmation page. But still, it’s an entire minute when it should be several seconds.
The server tech also disabled the JetPack plugin because it was causing some problems, according to him. I haven’t noticed anything difference since JetPack has been gone, but I wasn’t using pretty much anything in JetPack anyway (the only reason we had JetPack installed because we were under the impression that it was required for WooCommerce to run, but apparently that is not true). I disabled all non-essential plugins myself, but didn’t notice any improvement afterwards.
The duplicate, zero dollar, and “pending payment” orders stopped for a couple days, so I thought the server tech may have been partially successful (the very long checkout delay never went away). But now, all the problems with orders have returned. I am aware of no changes in the website whatsoever over the weekend, so I have no idea why those problems are back. Today and over the last couple days, when I’ve tested our checkout process with a real credit card, the payment always goes through just fine. The checkout screen does take a full minute to get to order confirmation, but the payment comes through almost immediately; no duplicates, no zero dollar orders, no orders stuck in “pending payment” forever. The tests look fine when the server webmaster does it as well.
I have no idea why it goes so horribly when customers do the exact same thing that we are doing. Our sales have gone way down since these problems started. Even though we can take payments again (though we have to cancel duplicate orders) we’re getting 50% of the total orders we normally do. We’ve had trouble before with updates breaking things temporarily, but nothing like this.
Version of WordPress we’re using: 6.2
The plugins we’re using are as follows:
- Code Profiler
- Code Snippets
- Elementor
- Flexible Shipping
- Starter Templates
- UpdraftPlus
- WooCommerce
- WooCommerce Authorize.Net Gateway
- WP Crontrol
- WP Mail SMTP
- WP Super Cache
Every plugin is up to date except Elementor who’s most recent version is still labeled “untested with your version of WordPress” (so it hasn’t been tested with the current version of WP? Interesting).
So, I don’t know what to do, and apparently our server tech doesn’t either. Have other websites been experiencing similar problems recently?
The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]
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