Common Issues & Quick Fixes

“It’s Not Working!” — Let’s Fix It

Welcome to the troubleshooting center. WordPress is a huge ecosystem with thousands of themes and plugins, and while Ultimate Spin Wheel is built to standard WordPress coding practices, conflicts occasionally happen. This guide covers the general issues that don’t fit a specific category like email or targeting: visual glitches, spins that do nothing, and settings that seem not to save. If you are seeing weird visual glitches, a dead Spin button, or a wheel that appears for admins but not guests, start here.

1. Visual & Design Glitches

The wheel looks “broken” or unstyled

Symptom: The text falls back to a plain serif font, the colors are missing, or the wheel and popup elements are scattered across the screen. Likely cause: CSS caching or aggressive minification. Speed-optimization plugins (Autoptimize, WP Rocket, SiteGround Optimizer, and similar) combine and reorder CSS to make pages load faster, and sometimes they break the load order or serve a stale file.

1. Clear every cache: Purge your caching plugin, then hard-refresh the browser (or open an Incognito window).
2. Exclude the stylesheet from minification: In your optimization plugin, find the “Exclude CSS from minification/combination” list and add spin-wheel.css (the plugin’s front-end stylesheet is enqueued from assets/css/spin-wheel.css).
3. Check for 404s: Open your browser’s developer tools (F12) → Network tab and refresh. If you see red “404 Not Found” errors for the plugin’s .css or asset files, the installation may be corrupted — deactivate, delete, and reinstall the plugin.

The popup is hidden behind my menu or chat widget

Symptom: You can see the wheel, but a sticky header or a floating chat button covers part of the popup. Cause: z-index (stacking order). The popup overlay ships with a high z-index already, but some themes and widgets stack even higher.

The plugin does not include a built-in “Custom CSS” box, so add a small override through your theme’s Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS panel (or any custom-CSS snippet plugin):

• .modal__overlay { z-index: 99999999 !important; }
• If the panel itself sits behind something, also raise .modal__container { z-index: 99999999 !important; }.

Save and refresh. If a chat widget still overlaps, give it a lower z-index in its own settings instead of pushing the wheel even higher.

2. Functionality & Logic Issues

I click “Spin” but nothing happens

Symptom: You click the button, the wheel never starts turning, and no message appears. Likely cause: a JavaScript conflict or a blocked AJAX request. The spin is decided by a secure server request, so if that request is blocked the animation never fires.

Investigate: Right-click the page → Inspect → Console, and look for red errors:

• Any JavaScript error from another plugin/theme: A script error elsewhere on the page can stop the wheel’s script from running. Note the file named in the error.
• 403 Forbidden on admin-ajax.php: A security plugin (Wordfence, Solid Security, and similar) is blocking the spin request because it looks like unusual activity.

Fixes:

• Security plugin: In your firewall settings, allow (whitelist) the AJAX action ultimate_spin_wheel_process_spin — this is the secure server-side spin handler.
• Theme/plugin conflict: Temporarily switch to a default theme (such as Twenty Twenty-Four) and, if needed, deactivate other plugins one at a time. When the wheel starts working, the last item you toggled is the conflict.

It works for me, but guests can’t see it

Symptom: You (logged in as admin) see the wheel, but a logged-out visitor or a private window shows nothing. Most common cause: server-side or CDN page caching serving a stale, wheel-free version of the page to guests.

1. Clear your server cache (many managed hosts add a purge button to the admin bar).
2. Clear your CDN cache (for example, purge everything in Cloudflare).
3. Re-check your campaign’s targeting: confirm the Page targeting, Device, and User Role conditions actually include logged-out visitors on the page you are testing. A role rule set to admins-only is a frequent culprit.

Note: the wheel’s “already played” state is kept in the visitor’s own browser storage (localStorage), not in a shared server cookie, so page caching does not hide the wheel based on whether someone has spun. If a specific visitor never sees it after playing, that is expected replay behavior, not a cache bug.

Changes I make aren’t saving

Symptom: You edit a probability or a design setting, click Save, but the old value returns on reload. Likely cause: a persistent object cache or database permissions.

• Object cache: If your site uses Redis or Memcached, flush it after saving.
• Database permissions: Confirm your MySQL user has INSERT/UPDATE rights — ask your host if you are unsure. Campaigns save as posts and leads save to the wp_wdengage_entries table, so both need writable database access.
• Browser cache: Hard-refresh the admin screen so you are not looking at a cached copy of the editor.

3. License & Update Issues (Pro)

License activation applies to the separate Ultimate Spin Wheel Pro plugin. The free plugin needs no key — every Pro feature simply stays locked until Pro is installed and activated. If you have purchased Pro and the key won’t activate, work through the checks below.

“Invalid license key” or “connection failed”

1. Check for stray spaces: Make sure you didn’t copy a leading or trailing space with the key. You can find the key on your account at account.wowdevs.com.
2. Firewall / outbound requests: Some strict host firewalls block the outbound connection to our licensing servers. Ask your host to allow outgoing HTTPS requests to wowdevs.com.
3. Re-activate: Open the License tab, deactivate the key if the option is shown, and activate it again.

4. Frequently Asked Questions

Will this slow down my site?

No. The wheel’s CSS and JavaScript are only enqueued on pages where an active campaign is set to display. Conditional loading keeps the assets off every other page, so the plugin adds no front-end weight where the wheel isn’t shown.

Does it work with Elementor, Divi, or other page builders?

Yes. The wheel renders through the standard wp_footer action rather than inside your page content, so it runs independently of the page builder you use.

Can I remove all the data and start over?

There is no “delete everything on uninstall” toggle. Instead, the Settings → General tab has a Data Retention (Days) option that auto-cleans lead data after the number of days you set (default 365). To clear data yourself, delete leads from the Leads dashboard (bulk delete is supported and exports are available first) and delete the campaigns you no longer want. Back up before any bulk removal.

Related Documentation

• Emails Not Sending: Diagnose and fix coupon and notification email delivery.
• Win Probabilities: How the secure, server-side weighted draw works.

Conclusion

Most reported problems come down to caching or a plugin/theme conflict. Before contacting support, open your site in an Incognito window: if the wheel behaves correctly there, the issue is your browser or server cache. If you are still stuck, reach out through the wowDevs support center.