The feed is not updating automatically

If a feed is not updating to show the latest Instagram posts, either from your own Instagram account or even from a tagged post or hashtag feed, it's typically either related to your Instagram account needing to be reconnected or a WordPress cron issue.

Your access token has expired

This can happen from time to time. For Instagram Personal accounts, the access token is regenerated automatically by Spotlight, but that's not allowed for Instagram Business accounts. As such, Business accounts' access tokens will expire every 3 months or so. A notification appears on your site's Dashboard to remind you to reconnect your account and generate a new access token.

Please refer to this article to learn about how to reconnect your Instagram account.

WordPress cron issues

Cron is what WordPress (and Spotlight) uses to schedule and run small jobs across the site. It is typically triggered by visits to the website, so the first thing to check is whether you currently have a constant flow of traffic on your website. If it's still quite new, it could be the case that the lack of traffic is causing the WordPress cron system to not update frequently enough.

In order to understand whether this is the root cause or not, please install the WP Crontrol plugin. It will allow you to view your cron jobs from your WordPress admin dashboard by going to Tools > Cron Events.

When on that page, look out for any error messages. The error message could indicate that your host may have disabled the cron system, possibly for performance or security reasons. If that's the case, please contact your hosting provider to help you out with this since Spotlight requires WordPress cron to run its updates.

In the absence of any prominent errors, your next action would be to verify if there are any missing hooks in your cron. This handy guide can assist you in fixing missing hooks.

If no errors or missing hooks are observed, kindly contact us directly with a screenshot of the Cron Events page and we'll check whether anything stands out as a potential problem before proceeding any further.

You have turned off the "Future Off-Facebook Activity" option

The "Future Off-Facebook Activity" option in your Facebook account's settings is explained in detail here. If this option is turned off, your account will not be able to log into any connected apps, Spotlight included. This will cause the connection to fail and the feed will stop updating itself with new posts.

If you have this option turned off before connecting the Instagram account in Spotlight, the connection will fail.

If your Instagram account is already connected in Spotlight and you then turn off this option, your feed will stop updating and you may see an "Error #190" notification within Spotlight.

Please keep the "Future Off-Facebook Activity" option turned on at all times.