Sidebar Not Visible

[Carly Gardner]

Hi Bill,

The default sidebar on this website is no longer showing. It used to occasionally disappear and I could fix it by deactivating/reactivating the Yoast SEO plugin. Now it will never show, even if all plugins are disabled, down to only the theme.

Could you take a look?

Thanks!

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Carly,

This is an interesting one. Generally you can override the default layout (set in the theme options) on an individual page, post or product. The idea there is you can set up most of your site to be one way and override it just in certain situations.

I logged into your site (thanks for sending that over). I noticed that there is a page called blog and a category called blog. It appears that the blog page, your “posts page” is redirecting to the category blog. If you’ll notice in your admin bar when viewing http://www.innernutritionist.com/blog/ it says “Edit Category.”

You mentioned this used to work when you would disable Yoast. At one time redirects were part of the plugin, but that functionality was moved to the premium version only. Do you know if you had a redirect set up for the posts page to point to the category? That might have been the issue.

Also WordPress sometimes has difficulty when different items share a name. I tried switching your permalinks to the “plain” option and the blog page pulled up successfully with a sidebar at http://www.innernutritionist.com/?page_id=9 .

I turned them back on, so that page won’t work as expected at the moment. You can temporarily switch them to plain if you’d like to see what I mean.

Most likely it’s either the name of the category that is causing the trouble, or a leftover setting from Yoast if you had a redirect there. Those are the strings I would try pulling first. If you never set a redirect, you should be ok to rename the category and its slug. Clear out your caches, refresh the home page and then click on the link to your blog in the navigation. See how that works for you.

Let me know how it goes,
Bill

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