Failed to Save the Story (Changes not saved)

@votw Thank you for reaching out and sharing those details. This saving issue could be due to a number of issues from plugin conflicts to hosting setup or firewalls. Note that when I view your story, I no longer see any console errors related to the blocked CORs policy (as previously seen in your screenshot).

To begin troubleshooting your issue could you provide the following information:

Does this issue occur in an incognito window and with all other plugins disabled? You can also try a different browser as well.

* In incognito mode extensions are usually disabled, so you could try going through your normally enabled extensions to find out which one could be causing this issue.

You can check for any plugin conflicts by troubleshooting with the Health Check plugin. This is like disabling all other plugins, but only for you, not for visitors (so nothing will break).

Please perform the following troubleshooting steps:

1. Install and activate the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin
2. In WordPress admin, go to Plugins and click Troubleshoot to enable Troubleshooting Mode. This mode disables active plugins and switches to a default theme safely; this will not affect what your site visitors see, as it only changes the look and feel of your website for logged-in administrators.
3. On the Troubleshooting Mode page, under Web Stories, click Enable while troubleshooting
4. Go into the Web Stories Editor and see if you’re still not able to save.

If saving is successful while in Troubleshooting Mode, re-enable your site’s plugins one by one by clicking Enable while Troubleshooting for each and checking the story again. This can help us pinpoint if a particular plugin or theme is causing the issue.

Hi @luckynasan

Thanks for your reply.

I tried all of your recommendations and tried in Safari instead of chrome but no luck with those 3 stories – I still get the Failed to Save the Story message and changes do not save. All other stories are fine as mentioned.

thanks
Kate

@votw Thanks for the update! Interesting how you are not able to save only these stories. Could you help me gather a few additional details:

– Did you use a template or did you create new stories?
– Does the story save if you use the shortkey CMD + S?
– If you duplicate the story, edit, and save does it work there?

– If possible, could you check for any browser console errors when the story fails to save and share that screenshot?

If you see an error, can you get the _Response_ on the request by following these steps:

– In the dev tools, go to the _Network tab_
– Find and select the request that failed under the _Name column_. It should be highlighted in red (you may need to refresh the page again).
– Go to the _Response tab_, and take a screenshot or copy/ paste what is there

the first time this happened it was a template from the library.
The second I tried to use the same template but was having the same issues so started from scratch. I initially didn’t have a problem – although it did not index.

I reused the second template and the problem started again with stories 2 and 3.

This is the message from the response tab and screen shots if I have done it correctly:

{“code”:”internal_server_error”,”message”:”<p>There has been a critical error on this website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.<\/p><p>Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.<\/a><\/p>”,”data”:{“status”:500},”additional_errors”:[]}

https://ibb.co/FxCg1L9

https://ibb.co/tpHbpnp

@votw Thank you for the update. Let’s try to clear out a few of the console errors to try and narrow down the issue you are having with these stories not saving.

1) The console errors show 500 errors, which any 500 error is usually server-related indicating there may be something at host level which requires inspection. If your site admin email inbox linked you to a debugging article, have you had a chance to read through the article presented to you?

2) Additionally, there are console errors regarding CORs policy. It’s important that images have the required CORS headers set. Using a tool like CORS Tester one can verify whether CORS is set up correctly or not — and currently it’s not:
https://cors-test.codehappy.dev/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpicniclifestyle.com%2Fweb-stories%2Fbest-easter-picnic-recipes-and-ideas-story%2F&method=get

If you have set up a CDN for your site, you need to make sure that it has the correct CORS configuration. Specifically, you need to set the following headers on your CDN:

Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers

Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Once you have resolved these, please let me know if the issue still persists and we’ll go from there.

@votw Hello there, just checking in on how you were able to get on with the above. Are you still experiencing issues?

Hi @luckynasan

Not really. I have noticed 2 of the stories have since indexed but still wouldn’t save and one is now showing in GSC as

“Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical”.

This is the response I got from my hosting:

The debugging information you provided in the support thread was helpful! I think that the CORS issues that the Web Stories support folks were looking at are not something we can help with. Those errors seem to be coming from third-party resources, and we don’t have any control over those.

However, I don’t think those are related to the specific problem you are seeing, either. The problem with the particular web stories seems to be that saving those stories seems to want to use more memory than your PHP has configured as its upper limit. I was able to replicate the issue, see the “critical error” details on the server side, and raise the memory limit accordingly.

Once I did so, I was able to save https://picniclifestyle.com/web-stories/best-easter-picnic-recipes-and-ideas-story/ (in the editor). I did not try the others, so can you check those?

It’s still very slow to save, and I’m not sure why those particular stories want so much RAM to do so. I’ve spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting web stories for other folks so I’m going to look at your database to see if there improvements we can make that might help.

Do you know why those particular stories would use so much RAM as my hosting provider has discovered?

@votw That’s great to hear they were able to increase your memory limit accordingly and that story saved for you.

Anytime you add media, an element, or add anything else, there are scripts being loading in the Stories editor behind the scenes that can cause long load times and timeout issues if your hosting doesn’t have enough bandwidth. Videos and images uploaded for Web Stories are stored in your WordPress Media Library, just like images and videos that upload for blog posts and other content throughout your WordPress site. The impact that this storage will have on your website’s speed depends on a variety of factors, including your hosting provider and what hosting package you have.

For the stories you are having issues saving changes to, can you tell me what type of edit you were trying to make? Were trying to upload/add a video?

Depending on the amount and size of the videos, it can potentially take up lots of memory on your computer. Optimizing videos can take a lot of memory because it all happens in the browser. To help better improve this process for you, you can try following:

– Make sure your videos meet the guidelines of 1280×720 file size.

– Optimize your videos 1 at a time.

– Optimize videos locally on your computer before uploading.

If you disable video optimization under Stories -> Settings and reloading the editor, are you able to normally edit & save your story again?

@votw We are going to mark your topic as resolved as we haven’t received a response. Please feel free to open a new support topic if you continue to experience any issues. Thank you.