Issue refreshing ads with Elementor and Hello theme

[therrg]

Hello,

I have a client who wants a row of ads displayed on the home page of her website. She wants the ad group to display a different set of ads on each page load (i.e., upon refresh or navigating back to the page).

I have set up an ad group with the Block Mode setting. I inserted it on the home page (built with Elementor Pro and the Hello theme) using a shortcode. The ads display, but do not reload on refresh. The only time they do seem to refresh is when I’m logged in on the backend and viewing the page.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Technical details:
WordPress 5.8
AdRotate 5.8.20
Elementor 3.3.1
Elementor Pro 3.3.4
Hello Elementor 2.4.1

Other plugins (all up to date):
– Advanced Custom Fields
– Custom Post Type UI
– Code Snippets
– DynamicConditions
– Ele Custom Skin
– Insert Headers and Footers
– Jetpack
– Rank Math SEO

What I’ve tried:
– Clearing the page cache
– Testing in multiple browsers
– Visiting the page and refreshing or navigating away and back in private browsing
– Creating a new ad group

[Arnan de Gans]

Sounds like a caching issue. Especially since it seems to work better if you’re logged in.

AdRotate has support for Borlabs Cache and W3 Total Cache.
Check out this manual to see how to set up the plugins for that to work; https://ajdg.solutions/support/adrotate-manuals/caching-support/
Personally I prefer Borlabs cache (https://borlabs.io) as it’s much easier to set up.

[therrg]

Thank you, Arnan, that appears to be the case!

I am hosting the site on SiteGround and using their SiteGround Optimizer plugin. When I disabled the “Dynamic Caching” option, the ads started refreshing.

Any reason why this is the case? The SiteGround Optimizer “Dynamic Caching” option uses NGINX. I also have the option to enable Memchached; would that affect the ad rotation?

[Arnan de Gans]

I’m not familiar with Sitegrounds in-house plugins.
But if you can, either get hosting that doesn’t need caching or use a supported caching plugin.
Borlabs is very easy to set up for example. If that works with Siteground hosting (which it probably does) you’ll get very fast caching, ease of use and peace of mind for it 🥳

Most server side caching things (nginx proxies/caching or memcached) are not proper solutions for websites that need dynamic bits like AdRotate or webshops have.

[therrg]

Hey Arnan, I think I’m having more issues with AdRotate working.

I have two Groups of ads on the website home page: one is a dynamic banner that cycles, and the other is static block that refreshes to display 5 adverts each time.

The dynamic banner is displaying fine and rotating as expected. However, the 5 adverts (which were formerly just displaying the same ads on every refresh, but were refreshing after I disabled SiteGround caching) are not showing up.

I am using shortcodes to display the ads on the page, and as mentioned earlier in the thread, disabling caching seemed to fix the initial issue I was having.

Any thoughts on what might be the cause?

[therrg]

Never mind, I think I solved the problem. The ads were using “%image%” instead of “%asset%”. Fixing that on all ads resolved the issue. Just curious, what’s the difference and why did “%image%” stop working?

[Arnan de Gans]

%image% and %asset% do the same, except html files and such are not images. So a new tag to replace %image% got introduced several years ago.
To avoid confusion over which tag to use and why they’re pretty much the same the old %image% tag got phased out since then and recently was finally when %asset% fully took over.