Dropdown Icon's And Login Disappearing On One Site

[TheFreak]

I built SponsorsFreak.com in a staging environment by cloning an existing working ListingHive/HivePress installation. Once the site was completed, I migrated it to SponsorsFreak.com using the Softaculous cloning tool, as I have successfully done with other sites.

Since the migration, I’ve been seeing a very strange intermittent issue with the header/navigation.

The dropdown indicators/icons next to menu items sometimes display normally, but at other times they appear as small square boxes or disappear entirely. The site may display correctly on an iPhone while appearing incorrectly on a Galaxy S24.

More importantly, when this problem occurs, the front-end HivePress user/Admin login also does not work, so the issue appears to affect more than just the visual menu icons.

I have also seen the problem on a desktop Mac (see screenshots). Strangely, after I log into the WordPress dashboard as Administrator and update a plugin or make another change, the missing navigation/login functionality almost always reappears.

I have several other HivePress/ListingHive sites using essentially the same plugin stack, and none of them have this problem.

I have already checked some of the obvious possibilities. WP-Optimize was inactive and has now been removed. SponsorsFreak does have more Code Snippets than some of the working sites, so I am comparing those as well, although none appear related to the header or navigation.

Could this be caused by something left over from the staging-domain migration, such as cached CSS/JS, old URLs, fonts/icons, theme assets, or HivePress settings?

Is there anything HivePress-specific that should be reset, regenerated, or refreshed after cloning/migrating a ListingHive site to a different domain?

I previously confirmed with HivePress support that my lifetime license was expanded to allow use on up to 9 websites/domains, so SponsorsFreak.com should be covered under that license.

Since SponsorsFreak was originally built on a staging domain and then cloned to SponsorsFreak.com, could the staging-domain activation or migration have left behind any license/domain information that might cause this behavior? Should I remove/deactivate the license from the staging installation after migration, or would the license have no effect at all on front-end assets, icons, navigation, or login behavior?

Thanks for your assistance.

[ChrisB]

Hi @TheFreak,

I believe the little arrows (chevrons) next to the menu items are added via CSS and Font Awesome. If you open up your browser Dev Tools, can you see any issues reported there?

Have you noticed any other icons not rendering as expected, or is it only the arrows in the main menu?

Edit: i just had a quick look on my phone, and it seems like at least the homepage isn’t set up to use a secure connection according to my browser. I can indeed see many broken icons. However, interestingly, when I change page the connection issue resolves, as does the broken icons.

Screenshots below:

Cheers,
Chris

[TheFreak]

Thanks for the feedback — your comment about checking the secure connection and the fact that the broken icons disappeared when you changed pages helped me track this down.

It turned out not to be a HivePress or ListingHive issue at all. The problem was a WWW vs. non-WWW mismatch at the server level.

In my case, the site was configured around:

https://www.sponsorsfreak.com

but the WWW and non-WWW versions were not being forced to one canonical URL, so https://sponsorsfreak.com could load separately.

Depending on which version loaded, some HivePress/Font Awesome assets were being requested from the other hostname, which caused the CORS issue, broken square icons, and even interfered with the front-end login.

ScalaHosting checked the domain configuration and found that the WWW and non-WWW versions were being served inconsistently. They corrected the redirect so https://sponsorsfreak.com now consistently redirects to https://www.sponsorsfreak.com, and the issue disappeared.

So for anyone else who runs into strange missing HivePress icons after cloning or migrating a site, it’s worth checking that your WordPress URLs, SSL/server configuration, and WWW/non-WWW redirects all use one consistent canonical domain. Don’t let both versions of the domain operate independently.

Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction. Your screenshots showing the secure/non-secure behavior were what finally made the issue obvious.

[ChrisB]

Hi @TheFreak,

That’s awesome! I’m glad to hear you got things resolved and happy I could could point you in the right direction. Thanks for sharing the solution, as well, in case someone else runs into the same issue.

Cheers,
Chris