Frequently Asked Questions

Issues with the display of product recommendations are commonly caused by page caching. It is also possible that your hosting configuration is preventing the extension from queuing and/or processing (re)generation tasks reliably.

Diagnosing Issues Caused By Page Caching

If your server is configured to serve cached content/pages, certain recommendation engines deployed in catalog/product pages may:

• fail to display dynamic, personalized, or conditional content; or even
• not be rendered at all.

To get these recommendations to display properly for visitors without an active session, you can use an alternative method for rendering recommendations that will bypass your server’s page cache on these pages:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Recommendations.
2. Locate the Deployments rendering > Use AJAX option and enable it.

Note that enabling this option may introduce a noticeable delay between the time that a page has fully loaded and the time that recommendations become visible to visitors without an active session. This delay will depend on the speed of your server, and the quality of your each visitor’s network connection. If this is an issue, the next option is to completely disable the page caching features enabled on your site/server (not recommended).

Diagnosing Issues With Task Queuing

The extension utilizes a queuing mechanism to process (re)generation tasks optimally. This effectively spreads out the amount of “work” that your server will need to do to regenerate recommendations over time. If you are experiencing an issue, or wish to get a deeper understanding of the specific tasks handled by this queue at any moment, you may navigate to WooCommerce > Status > Recommendations Queue. Here you will find:

• a list of all pending (re)generation tasks currently in the queue; and
• a list of failed re-generation jobs.

On a healthy, trouble-free installation, re-generation tasks should never fail to complete. Recurring failures may indicate an issue with your WordPress hosting environment, or a corrupted database.

Yes! In addition to deploying Engines in the standard Locations available under WooCommerce > Recommendations > Locations, you can use the free Product Recommendations – Custom Locations feature plugin to create Custom Locations for deploying Engines. Each Custom Location has its own, unique shortcode that you can place in any page or post of your site.

Yes, Product Recommendations is compatible with Product Vendors. Product Recommendations adds Vendor and Current Vendor filters that work similarly to the Category and Current Category filters.

Note: This document is meant to serve as a helpful guide for advanced troubleshooting; however, the procedures described are beyond the scope of our support policy and we cannot provide direct assistance with implementing them. 

If you would like to seek assistance from a qualified WordPress/WooCommerce developer, we highly recommend Codeable or a Woo Agency Partner. 

Product Recommendations adds the following tables to your site’s database:

• wp_woocommerce_prl_deploymentmeta
• wp_woocommerce_prl_deployments
• wp_woocommerce_prl_frequencies
• wp_woocommerce_prl_tracking_clicks
• wp_woocommerce_prl_tracking_conversions
• wp_woocommerce_prl_tracking_views

If you are seeing a notice that your regeneration queue is full, this indicates that some background tasks are not running correctly.

Navigate to your site’s Tools > Site Health tab and check for any errors that indicate that loopback requests or scheduled actions/events are not working as expected.

The most common cause of this is that your host is unable to resolve the address 127.0.0.1. Please reach out to them for help with resolving this in your server configuration.

How do I handle failed loopback request notices in Product Recommendations?

If loopback requests do not work correctly in your store, then this indicates a server misconfiguration which prevents your site from making requests to itself. This issue can affect core WooCommerce and WordPress functionalities such as database and plugin updates.

Specifically, for Product Recommendations, if loopback requests are not working correctly in a site, then recommendations will not be generated.

You’ll need to contact your hosting provider and ask them to enable loopback requests. When reaching out, include a screenshot of Tools > Site Health. It will provide more details of the error.

To clear all Product Recommendations data, you can use the below snippet. This will create a new tool under WooCommerce > Status > Tools called “Delete Product Recommendations Performance Data“.

Click on “Delete All“ to remove all Product Recommendations performance data.

add_filter( 'woocommerce_debug_tools', 'sw_prl_add_delete_performance_data_tool' );
function sw_prl_add_delete_performance_data_tool( $tools ) {
	$tools[ 'prl_delete_performance_data' ] = array(
		'name'     => __( 'Delete Product Recommendations  Performace Data', 'woocommerce-product-recommendations' ),
		'button'   => __( 'Delete all', 'woocommerce-product-recommendations' ),
		'desc'     => __( 'This tool will delete all Performace data in Product Recommendations.', 'woocommerce-product-recommendations' ),
		'callback' => 'sw_prl_delete_performance_data_tool_cb'
	);
	return $tools;
}
function sw_prl_delete_performance_data_tool_cb() {
	global $wpdb;
	$tables   = array();
	$tables[] = $wpdb->prefix . 'woocommerce_prl_tracking_views';
	$tables[] = $wpdb->prefix . 'woocommerce_prl_tracking_clicks';
	$tables[] = $wpdb->prefix . 'woocommerce_prl_tracking_conversions';
	foreach ( $tables as $table ) {
		$wpdb->query( "DELETE FROM `$table` WHERE 1=1" );
	}
	delete_transient( strtolower( 'WC_PRL_Admin_Performance' ) );
}

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