Feed preview in admin is up to date but 3 months old on front-end

Hi @wordyad

Thanks for reaching out! From what you’ve described, the feed itself is updating correctly in the admin preview, but the front-end is still showing older entries. This kind of behavior is most commonly related to caching, even if it’s not immediately obvious.

Since you’ve already disabled basic caching, here are a few additional areas worth checking:

1. Object Caching: If your hosting uses Redis or Memcached, the stored feed content might still be coming from there.
2. Theme or Page Builder Caching: Some themes or page builders (like Elementor or WPBakery) have their own caching layers that may need to be cleared manually.
3. CDN/Server Cache: If you’re using a CDN like Cloudflare, or if your host uses server-side caching, make sure to purge the cache there as well.

If you’re not sure where to look or would like help checking any of this, feel free to share a bit more about your setup (theme, caching plugins, hosting provider, etc.), I’ll be happy to guide you through it.

Hi @wordyad

Thanks for the follow-up, and I understand how frustrating this must be.

At this point, it would be helpful if you could please share the following:

1. A screenshot of your Feed Items page (from the WordPress admin), showing that it’s pulling in the most recent items from the feed.
2. A screenshot of how the “Latest from Variety” section is configured on the backend. For example, showing the shortcode or block being used.

These details will give us a clearer picture of your current setup and help us troubleshoot more effectively.

Looking forward to your reply!

Hi @wordyad

Thanks for getting back to us and for sharing those links!

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to open either of the images, both links are displaying the message:
“That page doesn’t exist. The requested page was not found.”

Would you mind re-uploading the screenshots or using a different image sharing service?

Once we can view them, we’ll be able to take a closer look and assist you further.

Looking forward to your update!

Hi @wordyad

Thanks so much for re-uploading the screenshots, we can view them now!

From what we see, the item does appear in the preview, which is a great start. However, just to clarify, an item showing in the preview doesn’t necessarily mean it has been fully imported.

To confirm this, could you please go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Feed Items? This will show you whether the item has actually been imported into your site.

Let us know what you find there, and we’ll be happy to guide you further based on that.

Hi @wordyad

Since some recent items are showing in the preview but not appearing in the Feed Items section, the next step is to manually trigger a fetch to see if that brings them in.

To do this:

1. Go to Aggregator > Sources in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Find the source in question.
3. Under the Imported Items column, click the green Fetch link.

This will manually trigger Aggregator to attempt importing the latest items from the feed. Once done, check the Feed Items page again to see if they now appear.

Let us know how that goes. We’re here to help if you need further guidance!

Hi @wordyad

If your feed isn’t updating automatically, it’s often due to a cron issue. To help us investigate further, please follow these steps:

1. Install and activate the WP Crontrol plugin on your website.
2. Navigate to Tools > Cron Events.
3. In the search box, enter “wpra” and then click on the Search Hook Names button.
4. Take a screenshot of the search results.

Please send the screenshot to us for investigation purposes.

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing back from you soon.

Hi @wordyad

Thanks so much for sharing the screenshot!

Based on what we’re seeing, the wpra.update cron event is scheduled to run every 60 seconds, which is shorter than your site’s WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT setting (currently at 120 seconds). This mismatch can lead to delayed or skipped feed imports, especially if the previous task hasn’t completed before the next one is scheduled.

What you can do:

Option 1: Increase the import interval
To avoid this conflict, we recommend increasing the interval to at least 2 minutes. You can use the following snippet to set it to 15 minutes, which is a stable and commonly used interval:

add_filter( 'wpra.updater.schedule.interval', function ( $interval ) {
    return 15 * MINUTE_IN_SECONDS;
} );

Option 2: Adjust the timeout constant
If you need updates more frequently (e.g. every 60 seconds), you could speak with your host or developer about lowering the WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT value in your wp-config.php file. For example:

define( 'WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT', 60 );

I hope that helps! Please let us know how it goes.