External Service Integration Not Working

Integration issues often occur when an external service, instead of using a standard API endpoint, sends requests to your homepage using only URL query arguments.

For example, if you connect your site to an external service via a specific plugin, that service needs to communicate with your WordPress site. Best practice involves calling a clean endpoint such as https://example.com/wp-json/wp/v2/…. However, some services call your homepage directly using a format like http://example.com/?sample-variable=value.

If you have disabled that integration plugin on your homepage to improve performance, the connection will fail because the plugin’s code never runs during that specific request.

How to Resolve the Issue

If this matches your situation, you can fix it by following these steps:

  • Go to Custom URLs => Frontend URLs.
  • Add a new row with the pattern: [home]?*
  • Enable the integration plugin for this row.
  • Save your changes.

This ensures that whenever the homepage is requested with any query arguments, the integration plugin remains active.

Refining the Solution

While the method above is the easiest fix, it may not be the most efficient. You might not want the plugin active for every query argument (such as social media tracking parameters). To enable the plugin only when the specific external service calls your site, you should identify the exact query arguments used and create a specific pattern.

To discover the exact query arguments, follow these steps:

Enable debugging in wp-config.php by adding these lines before the /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */ comment:

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true ); define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false ); define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );
 
– Download, install, and activate FDP Logger from this link. Ensure FDP Logger is active globally.
– Trigger the integration call from the external service.
– Check the contents of the file: wp-content/debug.log.
 

If the external service calls https://example.com/?sample-variable1=sample-value1, your log will show an entry similar to this:

******* FDP Logger Start ******* URL: example.com/?sample-variable1=sample-value1 $_GET: Array ( [sample-variable1] => sample-value1 ) ...
In this case, go to Custom URLs => Frontend URLs and use a more specific pattern like: *sample-variable1=*