Plugin Troubleshooting

Experiencing issues with your WordPress Parse.ly Plugin? This guide addresses common queries about pageviews, plugin settings, metadata, and duplicate content. Ensure that you have your Site ID, have read our plugin installation guide, configured the plugin, and checked our common questions. If you still have questions, continue reading below for plugin troubleshooting steps.

The plugin isn’t generating pageviews

Check through each of these potential causes:

Basic settings

• You may find these settings at /wp-admin/options-general.php?page=parsely
• Verify that you have specified the Site ID in the plugin’s options. You should have received this value from Parse.ly Support.
• You may have set “Track Logged-in Users” to No. If you’re a logged-in user, you will not see the tracking code. Log out of WordPress and test again.
• You may have set “Disable JavaScript” to Yes. This prevents the plugin from loading the tracking code but still allows the plugin to send your metadata. Use of this filter will override the setting.

Recrawl settings

• Settings found at wp-admin/options-general.php?page=parsely#recrawl-section
• Check your “Track Post Types as” settings. Verify that you’re tracking the desired post type(s).

Advanced settings

• Settings located at /wp-admin/options-general.php?page=parsely#advanced-section
• Check your Disable Autotracking setting. The default setting is No. If this setting is Yes, then we will rely on you to implement dynamic tracking. We’ll still receive heartbeat events, regardless.

Factors outside of the plugin interface

• The plugin relies on the wp_head() and wp_footer() WordPress functions to work. If your site uses a non-standard WordPress template, your site may not call these functions. In that case, contact Support.
• By default, the plugin only tracks posts with the publish status. This behavior can be changed by using the filter_trackable_statuses filter:

add_filter( 'wp_parsely_trackable_statuses', 'filter_trackable_statuses', 10, 2 ); 
function filter_trackable_statuses( $statuses, $post ) {
	$statuses[] = 'future';
	$statuses[] = ...;
	return $statuses;
} 

• To avoid data leakage, we don’t insert the tracking code in password-protected pages when the user hasn’t provided the password. This behavior can be changed by using the wp_parsely_skip_post_password_check filter:

add_filter( 'wp_parsely_skip_post_password_check', '__return_true' ); 

I have unexpected or undesired metadata in Dash

• Check the Recrawl settings. If you’ve had Parse.ly for a while and you’re changing a setting, contact Support to perform a bulk recrawl of your site. Verify your selections for:
  • “Use Top-Level Categories for Section”
  • “Use Custom Taxonomy for Section”
  • If you want to use your WordPress category values as Parse.ly tags, use the “Add Categories to Tags” option
• If those options aren’t sufficient, customize your metadata with one of these filters.

Why do I see duplicate content in the Parse.ly Dash?

When Parse.ly crawls a website, it will read every page’s metadata. If you see duplicate content (posts or pages that are identical but separated into two items) in the Parse.ly dashboard, this is usually caused by a post being accessible from different URLs (for instance, http://example.com/post-1 and http://wwww.example.com/post-1).

As the plugin gets the canonical URL from WordPress for every page and puts it into the metadata, a possible fix to this would be to modify the plugin’s metadata output by using the wp_parsely_metadata filter.

However, we do not recommend this approach as it doesn’t solve the root of the problem. Having duplicate content can have severe implications, including SEO. We recommend fixing the issue at the WordPress level and moving your site to having just one canonical URL for every page.

Additional Resources

If this guide did not solve your plugin troubleshooting needs, please contact Support.