Recently I needed to install the WordPress Plugin WP-Polls onto a website to conduct a survey of the website’s visitors. It’s a great little plugin, and works very quickly and easily allowing website owners to create polls and have their visitors vote in the poll.
It’s also very topical considering the current EU referendum!
Anyhow, after installing this plugin I noticed it wasn’t actually working as expected. It outputted the question and the poll answers sure enough, but the ‘Vote’ button didn’t work when clicked on, and neither did the ‘show results’ link. It was as if the button was deactivated.
A quick search on Google revealed that this was a common problem, with a couple of possible causes and fixes. As I’m often frustrated at the way WordPress.org closes down its support forum threads before someone has posted a solution to any issue, I thought it was a good idea to write about these causes, and solutions, here. Do let me know if you find this post useful.
The issue:
The ‘vote’ button on WP-Polls does nothing when pressed, nor can you see current votes. Everything else seems to work fine.
Before we start
The most common cause to this is issues with the current WordPress Theme. Try activating one of the WordPress default themes for a moment, and looking at the poll again. If it works fine and you’re able to press the ‘vote’ button then the issue is definitely with your theme, but there are still a couple of possible causes and very simple fixes.
Cause #1
The theme is missing the wp_head and the wp_footer includes. Look at the source code for the header and footer of your theme. Can you see the following code?
<?php wp_head(); ?>
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
If not, make sure you add them as the WP-Polls plugin uses those to insert necessary code for it to function. The wp_footer should be just before the tag (probably in your footer.php file) and the wp_head should be just before the tag (probably in your header.php file).
Now try your poll again. Is it working? If not, here’s possible cause number two.
Cause #2
Your version of jQuery is out of date. Luckily, there’s a WordPress Plugin for that. The Plugin ‘jQuery Updater’ ensures the version of jQuery your website is using (vital for the WP-Polls Plugin to work) is the latest stable version. All you need to do is install the Plugin and activate it, nothing else. It will automatically use the latest version of jQuery on your website.
Now check your poll once again and try to click the vote button. That should have fixed the issue. If it has, let me know below how you got on – and give the post a share so others can get their WP-Polls working too.
I fixed my WP-Polls WordPress Plugin. Here’s how you can too.
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The post WP-Polls not working in WordPress – how to fix it appeared first on Engage Web.