Shortcodes not rendering

If you have shortcodes in your content that are not rendering, you could see, for instance, something like this:

[wpseo_map id="all" width="400" height="300" zoom="-1" map_style="roadmap" show_route="0" show_state="0"]

This can be caused by two things:

  1. The plugin providing the shortcode is not active. The shortcode then won’t work.
  2. Your theme is outputting the post content without applying the needed filters on it.

Fixing your theme

If you install the What the file plugin, you can see which file in your theme is being used to render the page that has the issue. You should then open that file and see what’s there. Usually you’ll find it has something like this:

echo $post->post_content;

If that’s the case, try making it so that it properly uses the WordPress loop and the function the_content(); to output the content. If you really can’t do that, you can change the code to:

echo apply_filters( 'the_content', $post->post_content );

This would not be our preferred option though, as that’s bound to have other issues as well…

Related articles

Get free SEO tips!