Videos and Maps Not Visible Despite Consent

The Symptom

On a property detail page, an embedded piece of content behaves as if it were broken:

• The video’s thumbnail image is displayed, but clicking Play video does nothing. The label text disappears, but no video opens.
• The same happens with a virtual tour.
• The map stays empty, or the map’s consent box doesn’t even appear in the first place.

Typically, the problem only occurs from the second page load onward — that is, after visitors have accepted the cookies once. On the very first visit, everything still works.

The Cause

Consent plugins block third-party scripts by scanning the content of every script for known addresses — such as youtube.com or google.com/maps.

WP-ImmoMakler stores its gallery configuration in exactly such a script block, and for a video, that configuration quite normally contains the YouTube or Vimeo address. The consent plugin therefore takes the block for a YouTube script and blocks it — even though it doesn’t load anything itself, it only contains data.

As soon as visitors then accept the marketing cookies, the consent plugin executes the blocked block as program code. That fails, and the configuration then disappears from the page. From the next page load onward, WP-ImmoMakler no longer finds any configuration and the tile stays non-functional.

Affected are websites using the Complianz consent plugin, and only there when YouTube, Vimeo, or Google Maps is activated as a service in Complianz.

The Fix

1. Update WP-ImmoMakler

   As of version 5.69.0, WP-ImmoMakler marks these blocks as technically necessary, so consent plugins leave them alone. Update the plugin via your shop customer account or via Plugins → Installed Plugins.

2. Clear caches

   Clear your caching plugin’s cache, then your browser cache. As long as a page is served from cache, the old, broken version keeps being delivered — the problem then appears to persist even though it has already been fixed.

3. Check in a private browsing window

   Open the property page in a private browsing window, accept the cookies, and then reload the page. The video, virtual tour, and map should now work.

Tip

You can tell whether this is exactly what’s happening by checking your browser’s developer console: when the cookies are accepted, an error message like SyntaxError: Unexpected token ':' appears there, originating from the file complianz.min.js.

If the Problem Persists

Check whether your consent plugin is additionally blocking the content itself. In that case, visitors are asked for consent twice, and both prompts have to be answered. Which prompt WP-ImmoMakler itself shows, and how to turn it off, is described on the page GDPR-Compliant Cookie Consent.

You might also be interested in

• GDPR-Compliant Cookie Consent
• Using WP-ImmoMakler with Complianz
• Embedding Videos