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Basic troubleshooting

Having trouble with your Sensei LMS plugin? This guide will walk you through troubleshooting common issues step-by-step.

Before you begin: It’s crucial to create a full backup of your website before making any changes. This ensures you can revert to a working version if something goes wrong.

Classic Editor

Sensei LMS is a block-based plugin, and as such, the Classic Editor plugin is no longer supported. If you’re having any trouble with Sensei LMS, first check whether you are using the Classic Editor. If so, try disabling it and see if that resolves your issue.

Troubleshooting Plugin Issues

  1. Isolate the Problem: Deactivate all plugins except Sensei LMS. If the issue disappears, a deactivated plugin is causing the problem.
  2. Identify the Culprit: Reactivate plugins one by one, testing the site after each reactivation. The issue will reappear when you activate the conflicting plugin.
  3. Check for any known issues: If you’d like to check for any current third-party theme/plugin conflicts, you can search for open issues in the public GitHub repository
  4. Report the Issue: Contact the plugin’s support team and report the problem. This helps them troubleshoot and fix the issue in future updates.

Troubleshooting Theme Issues

  1. Switch Themes: Temporarily switch to a default WordPress theme like Twenty Twenty-Two (https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentytwo/). See if the problem persists.
  2. Check for any known issues: If you’d like to check for any current third-party theme/plugin conflicts, you can search for open issues in the public GitHub repository
  3. Seek Theme Support: If the default theme fixes the issue, reach out to your theme developers for assistance.
  4. Additional Guide: For more in-depth troubleshooting with themes, refer to this guide: https://senseilms.com/documentation/theme-compatibility/#troubleshooting-issues

Troubleshooting on a Staging Site

What is a staging site? A staging site is a replica of your live website used for testing purposes. This allows you to troubleshoot issues without affecting your visitors.

Troubleshooting using the Health Check Plugin

  1. Install the Plugin: Install the Health Check plugin from the WordPress plugin directory: https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/
  2. Activate Troubleshooting Mode: Activate the plugin and navigate to the “Troubleshooting” tab. Click “Enable troubleshooting mode.”
  3. Test Functionality: This creates a temporary session where all plugins are disabled and a default theme is used. Test your site in this mode to see if the problem persists.
  4. Identify the Cause: If the problem disappears in troubleshooting mode, it’s likely caused by a plugin or theme.
  5. More Information: Refer to this guide for detailed instructions on using the Health Check plugin: https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/appendix/troubleshooting-using-the-health-check/  

Deactivating Plugins or Themes via FTP/cPanel

Important Note: This method should be used only if you cannot access the WordPress admin area due to a plugin issue.

  1. Access Your Files: Use an FTP client like FileZilla or cPanel to access your website’s files and folders.
  2. Deactivate Plugins: Rename the wp-content/plugins folder to wp-content/plugins-old. This deactivates all plugins, allowing you to regain access to your admin area.
  3. Deactivate Themes: If necessary, use the same method to deactivate your theme by renaming its folder within wp-content/themes. Ensure you have a default theme installed for this to work.

404 Issues

If you’re seeing a 404 page or 404 error after setting a Sensei custom page (e.g., Course Archive page), it’s possible that the permalink is not being generated properly upon saving the new Sensei custom page.

Would you try re-saving permalink structure? To do that:

  1. Navigate to WP-admin > Settings > Permalinks (wp-admin/options-permalink.php)
  2. Click “Save Changes” (note: you do not need to make any changes on this page; clicking ‘save changes’ will re-save permalink settings)

Note: this permalink issue is common on sites running on translation files and/or 3rd party themes. If the above permalink re-saving trick works for you, that’ll serve as a workaround while you look for the cause via plugin or theme conflict testing as noted on this page.

PHP Fatal Errors

If your WordPress site shows a fatal error, you can debug the error by adding some code to your wp-config.php file, as described in WordPress’s guide to debugging.

If you find the error is caused by Sensei LMS, please reach out to us to share the full error message so we can investigate.

Checking for Role-Based Content Restrictions

If you’re experiencing issues where content is visible when a prerequisite is set, it might be due to Sensei LMS’s user role-based access control (i.e., logged in as a Teacher, Student, Admin, etc).

Administrators on the platform can see all content by default. This means if you’re logged in as an administrator, you might see content that regular teachers or students cannot access. You can find more details about administrator capabilities here.

To accurately test how learners see your course content, we recommend utilizing the “Preview as a Student” feature available to administrators. This functionality allows you to temporarily switch your view to that of a student, enabling you to experience the course content and its visibility just as learners would.

For detailed instructions on using the “Preview as a Student” feature, you can refer to our documentation here: https://senseilms.com/documentation/student-management/#preview-as-a-student.

Known Issues

Translation Plugins

There are some known issues related to WPML and Loco Translate. Follow the links to check the current open issues.  

Also, please check out our troubleshooting steps for identifying and resolving issues for translating with WPML: https://senseilms.com/documentation/create-a-multilingual-course-with-wpml/#troubleshooting

Theme Builders

Sensei is optimized for the Block Editor that comes with WordPress core. Some features may be unavailable with 3rd party page builders. Using the Learning Mode course templates can help minimize any of these issues.

Caching Plugins

Server caching plugins are known to cause issues with Sensei Courses, such as students not able to view courses after enrolment/purchase.

This happens because the unenrolled version of the course page is served to students even after they have enrolled to the course.

As a solution, please exclude Sensei pages from being cached.

Additional Resources

Next Steps

If the steps on this page don’t fix the problem, please try the following:

For the core Sensei plugin, you can submit a bug report on the GH issue by following this guide.

If you need further support for troubleshooting, please reach out via the following contacts: