Banner Not Appearing — Troubleshooting

Symptom

Your consent banner does not appear on the front end of your website, even though the plugin is activated and configured.

Common Causes and Fixes

1. Bot Detection Is Blocking Your Test Request

Cause: The plugin includes a bot detection system (based on CrawlerDetect) that suppresses the banner for search engine crawlers and automated bots. If your testing tool, browser extension, or custom User-Agent string matches the crawler regex pattern, the banner is silently suppressed.

Fix:

1. Test with a standard desktop browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) using the default User-Agent string.
2. Avoid testing with tools like curl, Postman, or headless browsers unless you set a realistic User-Agent header.
3. If you need to disable bot detection temporarily for testing, go to WP Admin → Compliance → Settings tab → Technical Settings and toggle off Bot detection. Note: Bot detection, AMP, Caching compatibility, Debug mode, and Excluded handles only render for connected users. If your site is not connected, this option will not appear. Re-enable bot detection after testing.

Verify: Open your site in a normal browser with no User-Agent overrides. The banner should appear.

2. Conditional Display Rules Are Hiding the Banner

Cause: The plugin supports conditional display rules that control which pages show the banner. The default conditional_display behavior is set to hide, meaning when conditional display is enabled, the banner is hidden on matched pages/post types rather than shown.

Fix:

1. Go to WP Admin → Compliance by Hu-manity.co → Settings tab → Technical Settings.
2. Check the Conditional display toggle. If it is enabled, review your rules using the Conditional Rule Builder (rule groups joined by OR; rules within a group joined by AND; click + Add rule group to add a new group).
3. Verify whether your rules use “Show on these pages” or “Hide on these pages” logic. Note that the default behavior when conditional display is enabled is hide: matched rules hide the banner.
4. With conditional display enabled but no rules configured, no pages match, so the banner displays on all pages (no rules = no hide). When at least one rule matches the page you are testing, the banner is hidden on that page.
5. To test: disable Conditional display temporarily and check if the banner appears.

Verify: Turn off conditional display, reload your page, and confirm the banner appears.

3. Plugin Is Not Connected (No App ID)

Cause: The consent banner widget (hu-banner.min.js) requires an active connection with a valid App ID. If the plugin is installed but not connected to your Hu-manity.co account, the compliance banner script is not loaded.

Fix:

1. Go to WP Admin → Compliance by Hu-manity.co.
2. If you see the WelcomeModal prompting you to connect, complete the registration flow.
3. After connecting, verify that your Protection tab shows tracker data and your status is “Active.”

Verify: Check your page source for hu-banner.min.js. If the script tag is present, the connection is active.

4. Caching Plugin Serving Stale HTML

Cause: A caching plugin (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, etc.) or server-level page cache may be serving a cached version of your page from before the plugin was activated or configured.

Fix:

1. Purge your site’s page cache. The method depends on your caching plugin.
2. Ensure the Caching compatibility toggle is enabled: go to WP Admin → Compliance by Hu-manity.co → Settings tab → Technical Settings → Caching compatibility.
3. See Caching Plugin Compatibility for detailed guidance on supported caching plugins.

Verify: Open your site in an incognito/private browser window after purging the cache.

5. Banner Suppressed by Geolocation Rules

Cause: If you have geolocation enforcement configured (Professional plan only), the banner may only appear to visitors from specific regions. If you are testing from a location outside the configured regions, the banner will not display.

Fix:

1. Log in to app.hu-manity.co.
2. Go to Configuration → Consent.
3. Review your geolocation settings. Verify that your test location is included in the enforcement regions.
4. To test: use a VPN to simulate a visitor from a covered region (e.g., an EU country for GDPR).

Verify: Test from a covered region or temporarily disable geolocation restrictions.

6. Preview Mode or Page Builder Active

Cause: The plugin automatically suppresses the banner in several preview contexts to avoid interfering with content editing:

• WordPress post/page preview (is_preview())
• Customizer preview (is_customize_preview())
• Elementor editor
• Divi Builder (?fl_builder)
• WordPress JSON/REST API requests
• iFrame requests (IFRAME_REQUEST constant)
• The plugin’s own preview mode (?cn_preview_mode)

Fix: View the page on the live front end (not in a page builder, preview, or customizer).

Verify: Open the published page URL directly in a browser.

Still Not Working?

If you have checked all causes above and the banner still does not appear:

1. Enable Debug mode in Settings tab → Technical Settings and check your browser console for CC Banner: messages.
2. Inspect your page source for the hu-banner.min.js script tag. If missing, the plugin is not outputting the banner script (check plugin activation and connection status).
3. Check for JavaScript errors in the browser console that might prevent the banner from rendering.
4. Contact support with your site URL and a description of the steps you have taken.