The Continuous Refresh Loop
What Is The Problem
If you experience a continuous page refresh loop when the countdown timer ends, this is caused by either your caching plugin or hosting server (WP Engine) caching cookies on your site. This blocks the function of our plugin, so this of course is rather annoying and counterintuitive. This is not an issue with our plugin, but rather an issue with either a caching plugin or the hosting server blocking standard internet technology that is required for the features of our plugin to work.
How To Solve It
In order to resolve this problem, you could simply clear the cache. However, this would only be temporary local solution. To make it permanent for all visitors, you will need to find the setting in your plugin that is blocking cookies or find the setting that allows you to exclude certain cookies from the cache by ID.
Below is the cookie ID that needs to be excluded from the cache:
getUtilizedTime_ditp_countdown_timer_0If you happen to have more than one Divi Timer Pro module on the same page, then you would need to add additional cookies. These are based on the CSS divs of the module, so if you add a second module it would be ditp_countdown_timer_1, and if you add a third it would be ditp_countdown_timer 2, etc. So you would add additional cookies corresponding to the number of modules on any given page. So let’s say you have one page on your website with just one timer, but have another page on your website with 4 modules. In this scenario you would exclude the following cookies:
getUtilizedTime_ditp_countdown_timer_0
getUtilizedTime_ditp_countdown_timer_1
getUtilizedTime_ditp_countdown_timer_2
getUtilizedTime_ditp_countdown_timer_3Exclude Cookies From Caching Plugins
If you experience the continuous page refresh loop (on any server other than WP Engine – see below), it means one of your plugins is blocking the cookies. This most likely is caused by a caching or optimization related plugin. You will need to check the settings of any of your installed plugins to find the culprit.Â
Here is an example of how to exclude cookies in a caching plugin. The example shown in the screenshot is WP Rocket, but other plugins should have similar interfaces that allow you to do this. In the WP Rocket plugin, you can go to Settings>Advanced Rules and paste in the list of cookies above to exclude them from the website cache. This example would be if there are 6 timers on any single page of the website, which is unlikely. If you just have 1 or 2, see the notes above.
Exclude Cookies From WP Engine
Unfortunately, WP Engine is infamous for their stance on automatically caching cookies on their server. We have reached out to them about this, hoping to find a workaround, but there is none. Since WP Engine does not have any setting or field for users to excluded cookies from the server cache by themselves (like the caching plugins do), they have informed us that users of our plugin (and other plugins that rely on cookies) need to contact their customer support and tell them to exclude the cookies listed above from their server cache.
Exclude Cookies From SG Optimizer
Unfortunately, SG Optimizer can cause the cookies to be removed as well. There is currently no option to exclude cookies from the cache. We have reached out to them to try to determine if they have a solution or any new feature coming. Meanwhile, you can simply exclude the URL of the page containing the Divi Timer Pro module.Â
