My player stopped working: a step-by-step check

Start with Check my player on Settings → AjaxPress → Media Players. It reads a few pages of your site and tells you which players AjaxPress finds, whether each one is already kept, and which ones appear on more than one page. If it answers your question, you can stop here. See Media Players.

Otherwise, work through these checks in order. They’re sorted by how often each one turns out to be the cause, so the early ones are worth checking even if they seem too obvious.

1. Is the player on every page?

This is by far the most common cause.

Open two or three different pages on your site in a private window. Is the player on all of them? If it only appears on one page, it lives in that page’s content, and content is exactly what changes when a visitor moves on.

Fix: move the player into your header, footer or a site-wide widget area, or turn on your player plugin’s sticky or floating mode. See Keep audio or video playing.

2. Is the player marked, and does the selector match?

With the free plugin, the player’s wrapper needs data-ajaxpress-persist (or one of the other markers). With AjaxPress Pro, either Auto-detect Media Players has to find it (it’s listed under Detected players), or the Media Players selector has to match it. Auto-detect can’t see a player whose script builds it after the page loads; list that one by hand.

Open the browser console (F12, then Console) on a page with the player, and run:

document.querySelectorAll('#your-selector').length

Result	Meaning
0	The selector matches nothing. Inspect the player again
1	Correct
2 or more	Too broad. It would carry more than the player

3. Did you mark the wrapper, or only the audio tag?

If you mark only the <audio> element, the sound carries on but the play button, volume and artwork are left behind. The controls stop working or disappear.

Fix: mark the outermost element that contains every part of the player.

4. Two streams playing at once?

AjaxPress didn’t recognise the player on the new page as the one already playing, so it kept both. This usually happens because the stream URL has a changing parameter such as ?t=1736301234, or the player’s id changes from page to page.

Fix: give the wrapper a fixed identity:

<div id="radio-bar" data-ajaxpress-persist data-persist-key="live-radio">…</div>

5. Did the player move somewhere unexpected?

This is expected behaviour, not a fault. To keep playing, the player moves into a fixed container (#ajaxpress-persist) and leaves its original parent, so its position and any styles that came from that parent no longer apply.

Fix: give it its own positioning:

#radio-bar {
  position: fixed;
  left: 0;
  right: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  z-index: 10;
}

Also rewrite any CSS that reached the player through a parent, such as .site-footer .radio-player { … }.

6. Visible but doesn’t respond to clicks?

Right-click the player, choose Inspect, and look for visibility: hidden, opacity: 0 or pointer-events: none on it or its wrapper. Sticky or animated sections in some page builders add these. Override them:

#ajaxpress-persist [data-ajaxpress-lifted] {
  visibility: visible !important;
  opacity: 1 !important;
  pointer-events: auto !important;
}

Also check the console for errors. A player script that fails once stops working everywhere.

7. Does it stop on one particular page?

• That page has no player. Intended: continuity follows your pages. A page without the player stops it.
• That page loads the normal way. A link to another site, to wp-admin, or to an address in Exclude Links is a full page load, and a full page load restarts everything. See Which links AjaxPress handles.
• The visitor pressed reload. A reload always restarts the page. AjaxPress Pro’s Block Keyboard Reload stops accidental F5 and Ctrl+R presses.
• The page is a form submission to another site, such as a payment page. It leaves your site.

Still stuck?

Email [email protected] with:

• the plugin or theme that shows your player,
• a page address where we can see it,
• the selector or marker you used,
• which of the checks above you’ve already tried.

A page we can open ourselves is worth more than any description. It’s usually the difference between an answer the same day and a week of back and forth.