Why timing matters in diagnostic capture #
Most WordPress failures don’t produce a visible error at the exact moment they occur. A PHP fatal fires on the server. Half a second later the browser gets back a malformed response. Another second later a JavaScript error fires because the response it expected didn’t arrive. A second after that the Checkout Button stops responding, which is what you actually see.
If Loupely only captured what’s happening at the moment you click Run Diagnosis, it might catch the JavaScript error but miss the PHP fatal that caused it. The 60-second capture buffer is how Loupely captures the full chain.
How the buffer works #
The Loupely Chrome extension runs a rolling 60-second window of browser events in the background while you’re on a page. It’s not recording your screen or transmitting anything: it’s holding a local log of browser-side events (JavaScript errors, network requests, console output) in memory. When you click Run Diagnosis, Loupely takes the contents of that buffer along with the current server-side capture from the plugin and sends the combined payload for analysis.
The buffer holds the last 60 seconds of activity. Events older than 60 seconds roll out as new ones come in. Nothing in the buffer leaves your browser until you explicitly click Run Diagnosis.
What this means in practice #
You don’t need to click Run Diagnosis the instant something fails. If your WooCommerce checkout breaks when you click Place Order, you have up to 60 seconds after that moment to open the Loupely popup and click diagnose. The failure events will still be in the buffer.
This is especially useful for failures that are hard to reproduce exactly, or where the broken state persists for a few seconds before the page recovers or redirects. As long as you can get to the Loupely popup within 60 seconds of the failure, the relevant browser-side evidence is captured.
Getting the most out of the buffer #
The buffer captures browser-side events only. For the server-side half of the picture (PHP Errors, Hook Execution, WooCommerce pipeline events), the WordPress Plugin captures current server state at the moment you click Run Diagnosis rather than from a buffer. That means the most important thing you can do to help Loupely produce an accurate diagnosis is reproduce the failure deliberately, not just catch it after the fact.
The ideal sequence for getting the best capture:
- Navigate to the broken page.
- Trigger the failure (submit the form, click checkout, do whatever causes the problem).
- Without navigating away, open the Loupely popup within 60 seconds.
- Click Run Diagnosis.
If you navigate away from the page before clicking diagnose, the browser-side buffer for that page is cleared. You’d need to reproduce the failure again on the same page to get the capture.
Browser-only mode and the buffer #
The 60-second buffer operates the same way in browser-only mode (when the WordPress Plugin isn’t installed). The difference is that in browser-only mode, the server-side capture is absent. The buffer still captures browser events within the 60-second window, but correlation is limited to browser-side signals only.