WordPress doesn’t show the statement, or shows an old one

Narrowing it down

A notice instead of the statement

The sentence “The accessibility statement cannot be loaded at the moment.” appears when the plugin cannot retrieve a statement and has never retrieved one before. The causes, most common first:

1. No statement has been published yet. The plugin only shows published versions, never a draft. In the service, look at the “Statement” section in the website’s “Overview” tab: if it says “Draft” or nothing at all, publication is missing. What has to happen first – often open manual checks – is explained in From scan to published statement.
2. Your plan does not include publishing. Publishing is available from the Starter plan. Scans and findings work in the plugin without a publication.
3. The token was revoked or the site ID is wrong. Tools → Accessibility then reports an error on retrieval. Create a new token and connect again: Setting up and connecting the WordPress plugin.
4. The service was unreachable at the first retrieval. Reload the page later.

If the plugin has fetched a version before, it keeps showing that last version in all of these cases – with its original date. That way a statement does not vanish from your website because of an outage. The downside: a revoked token does not show on the page itself, only in Tools → Accessibility.

The old version is shown: caches

Between your publication and what a visitor sees, there can be up to three caches:

1. The plugin’s cache. The plugin fetches the statement at most every 60 minutes and keeps it in WordPress for that long. After a new publication, it can take up to 60 minutes until WordPress has the new version.
2. The page cache. Cache plugins such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache or WP Super Cache and many hosting providers store the finished page – including the statement text in it. As long as that copy is valid, nobody sees the new version, even if the plugin fetched it long ago. Depending on the settings, that can be hours or days.
3. The browser. Anyone who has the page open sees the new version after reloading.

What you can do

• Wait up to 60 minutes after publishing.
• Then clear the page cache for the page with the statement – in your cache plugin or in your hosting provider’s or CDN’s control panel.
• Easier in the long run: exclude the statement page from the page cache. Common cache plugins offer a list of addresses that are never cached.

Which version is currently shown

Compare two version numbers:

• on your WordPress page, the line with version and date below the text,
• in the service, the line with version and publication date in the website’s “Overview” tab – or the statement’s public address, which always shows the current version.

If the numbers differ, one of the caches is the reason.

What we advise against

• “Scan now” just to clear the cache. Starting a scan does discard the plugin’s cache, but it uses page quota and loads your pages again – and it does not clear the page cache.
• “Disconnect” and connecting again. That also deletes the last fetched version, which keeps the statement on your page during an outage.
• “Refresh status” fetches status and findings again, not the statement.

The text doesn’t match the latest scan

A published version is frozen. A new scan does not change it – neither in the service nor in WordPress. If the new result differs, the service marks the statement as “outdated”; it stays online.

The plugin does not show this marking; you see it in the service. The text only becomes current again with “Publish a new version” – and all requirements have to be met again, including manual checks that have been added since. More: Versions, “outdated” and PDF.

Still not solved?

Write to us using the contact form. Include the address of the page with the shortcode, what it shows, and the version number the service displays.