FooGallery Not Displaying? 7 Easy Ways To Fix It

A WordPress error can be incredibly frustrating. You’ve carefully curated a beautiful gallery, only for it to vanish from your live site. 

You’re likely seeing one of these signs:

• The gallery area is empty or blank
• Grey or blank thumbnails
• The gallery is replaced by its shortcode
• Images appear but don’t function

This guide will walk you through the most effective, step-by-step troubleshooting process to diagnose the cause and get your gallery working again.

TL;DR: The quickest fix for a FooGallery not displaying is to enable its “Custom Ready Event” setting and then clear all your website’s caches. However, before you make any changes, we strongly recommend that you troubleshoot on a test site. A test site helps you safely try fixes without any risk to your visitors.

Understanding Why Your FooGallery Is Not Working

When we tested FooGallery for a different article, we truly loved it. But, we noticed a lot of complaints of users not seeing their FooGalleries not working. it’s almost always due to a conflict within your WordPress environment. The gallery itself is rarely the problem; rather, something else is preventing it from loading correctly.

The most common causes are:

📢 Expert Advice: Install a staging plugin before you start. Create a staging site and conduct all the steps below on that staging site. Identify which solution helped you and implement that solution on your live site.

Now, let’s walk through the solutions step-by-step. Start with the first fix and work your way down the list, as these are ordered from most common to least common.

1. Check the gallery in the WordPress backend

First, let’s make sure you’ve installed a gallery plugin correctly.  This simple check rules out any basic configuration errors before you dive into more technical troubleshooting.

1. Log into your site: Access your WordPress dashboard with an administrator account.
2. Navigate to the gallery: Go to the page where the gallery is supposed to be. In the top admin bar, hover over “Galleries” and click the name of the gallery in question.
3. Confirm images are present: Ensure that the gallery contains images and that the preview works correctly within the editor. If it’s empty or broken here, you’ve found the problem.

2. Clear your website’s cache 

WordPress caching is a fantastic way to speed up your site, but it’s a common cause of a foogallery blank page because it can serve outdated files. Clearing all layers of cache ensures your browser loads the freshest version of your site.

3. Check for JavaScript errors

A lot of WordPress issues can be caused by JavaScript conflicts. Thankfully, your browser has a built-in tool called the developer console that can spot these errors for you.

1. Open the developer console: On the page with the broken gallery, right-click anywhere and select “Inspect”. A new panel will open.
2. Click the “Console” tab: Look for any error messages written in red text. A red error message is a strong indicator that another plugin or your theme is causing a conflict.

To fix this, go to FooGallery > Settings > Advanced in your WordPress dashboard. Check the box for “Custom Ready Event”. This changes how FooGallery’s scripts load, helping it bypass conflicts from other plugins. Save your changes and clear your caches again.

4. Resolve lazy loading conflicts

Are you seeing grey boxes where your images should be? When foogallery thumbnails do not appear, it often points to a lazy loading conflict. This happens when FooGallery’s lazy load feature clashes with a similar feature from your theme or another performance plugin.

1. Navigate to FooGallery settings: In your WordPress dashboard, go to FooGallery > Settings > Advanced.
2. Disable native lazy loading: Uncheck the box that says “Enable Native Browser Lazy Loading for FooGallery” and save your changes. This will prevent conflicts with other lazy-loading scripts.

📢 Expert Advice: Install a dedicated performance plugin that handles lazy loading better. Lazy loading may be critical for your website page speed. 

5. Isolate theme and plugin conflicts

If your gallery is still broken, it’s time to determine if your theme or another plugin is the source of the conflict. This process involves temporarily deactivating them to isolate the culprit. Remember to do this on a staging site.

📢 Expert Advice: Create a staging site if you haven’t already. Testing for conflicts on a live site is a recipe for chaos. 

1. Switch your theme: Temporarily activate a default WordPress theme like “Twenty Twenty-Four.” If the gallery appears, the problem lies within your original theme. Contact your theme’s developer for support.
2. Deactivate other plugins: Deactivate all plugins except for FooGallery. If the gallery reappears, you know one of your plugins is causing the issue. Reactivate them one by one, checking the gallery after each activation, until you find the conflicting plugin.

6. Verify required theme hooks are present

For FooGallery (and many other plugins) to work correctly, your theme must include two standard WordPress functions: wp_head() and wp_footer(). These hooks are where plugins load their scripts and styles.

If you are using a custom-built theme, ask your developer to confirm that wp_head() is present in the header.php file and wp_footer() is present in the footer.php file. Almost all well-coded themes include these, but a missing hook can definitely break your gallery.

7. Update FooGallery

Finally, update the plugin and make sure you are running the latest version of the FooGallery plugin. Developers regularly release updates to fix bugs and address compatibility issues with the latest version of WordPress. An outdated plugin is also more likely to cause security issues that can lead to website hacks. So, an update is good all around. 

How to Prevent Your WordPress Gallery From Not Showing 

Fixing a problem is good, but preventing it from happening again is even better. Here are some best practices to keep your galleries and your entire site running smoothly, especially when a WordPress gallery not showing images is a recurring problem.

Final Thoughts

When your FooGallery is not displaying your images correctly, it’s usually a symptom of a conflict elsewhere on your site. By systematically working through the troubleshooting steps, you can pinpoint and resolve the issue quickly. However we’ve learnt that the best way to prevent such errors from happening is to install a plugin like BlogVault. 

Services like BlogVault offer one-click staging and automated backups, giving you a completely safe environment to test changes. It even includes a visual regression tool that automatically detects visual changes after an update, so you would know immediately if a gallery or any other element on your site breaks. Taking these preventative measures is the key to a stable and reliable website.

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