Listings disappeared

When listings vanish from the front of your site, they are very rarely gone. Listings are only removed when someone deletes them; everything else only hides them. Start in Listings › All listings: if the listings are there, one of the causes below is keeping them out of sight.

Quick check

In Listings › All listings, look at the status tabs and filters:

What you see	Go to
The listings are Published, but not on the site	Language, expiry
They’re under Needs review or Not published	Moderation
They’re Expired	Expiry
They’re Unavailable, Sold or Spam	Status changes
They’re not in the list at all	Deleted

Your site language changed

This is the most surprising cause, and the most common one after a settings change.

When your site is multilingual (Settings › General › Languages › Multilingual), every listing remembers the language it was posted in, and visitors only see listings in the language they’re browsing. If you then change the site’s main language under Settings › Translations, all the listings posted in the old language are hidden, because they no longer match. The Translations page warns about this before you switch.

To fix it, do one of these:

Switch the site language back to the one the listings were posted in: Settings › Translations, then Use next to that language.
Or, if you don’t need several languages, switch Multilingual off under Settings › General and click Save changes. All listings show again, whatever language they were posted in.

See Multilingual sites before changing either setting again.

They expired

If Listing Expiration Date is set under Listings › Settings › Posting, a listing disappears from the site the given number of days after it was published. The seller is emailed and can renew it if Allow Listing Reactivation is on.

Lowering this number hides older listings immediately: change it from 90 to 30 days and every listing older than 30 days disappears at once. Raising it brings them back. Set it to 0 to never expire listings.

Imported listings expire the same way, based on the date in your import file. See Listing expiry and renewal.

They are waiting for approval

If moderation is on, new and sometimes edited listings wait in Listings › Moderation until you approve them. With the email-confirmation modes, they wait until the seller clicks the link in their email; with the payment modes, until they pay. See Moderation.

Someone changed their status

Sellers can deactivate their own listings or mark them as sold from their account.
You or a moderator may have deactivated them, marked them as spam, or used a bulk action.

Select the listings in Listings › All listings and use Activate to put them back.

A category or location was deleted

Deleting a category doesn’t delete its listings: they move to the parent category, or to the top of the tree if the category had no parent. They’re still on the site, filed somewhere else. Recreate the category and move the listings back by editing them. See Categories.

Only some pages are empty

Symptom	Likely cause
A category page is empty but the listings exist	They’re filed in a subcategory, in another location, or in another language.
Search finds nothing	Check the filters in the search form, and whether search covers descriptions (Settings › General › Search).
The home page shows no listings	Check the home page settings of your theme under Design › Theme Options.

They were deleted

Listings deleted from the admin panel, or by their seller, are gone for good, and so are their photos. If many listings vanished at once and none of the above applies, contact support as soon as possible and say roughly when they were last visible.

Manage listings — statuses, filters and bulk actions.
Listing expiry and renewal — how expiry works.
Multilingual sites — languages and listings.