FunnelKit Cart Not Showing: Fix the Slide-Out Cart

The 30-second answer

• Enable Cart toggle is off. Go to FunnelKit > Cart and turn on the Enable Cart toggle, then save.
• Icon Visibility is set to None. Under Visibility & Position, change Icon Visibility from None to Entire Website or WooCommerce Pages.
• Hide Cart Icon is on. A dedicated Hide Cart Icon setting inside the Cart section can suppress the floating button independently of the visibility field.
• Cart Menu not enabled. If you rely on the header icon or shortcode, the Enable Cart Menu toggle under FunnelKit > Cart > Cart Menu must also be on. Use the Add to Menu visibility method for header placement.
• Page-type exclusion. FunnelKit automatically suppresses the cart on its own funnel checkout, upsell, and optin steps. On landing-page post types it is also off by default. A code snippet can override this if you need it.
• Caching or JS conflict. Stale cache or a plugin delaying JavaScript loads can stop the drawer from rendering. Clear all cache layers and test in an incognito window.
• Theme CSS override. Your theme or a minification plugin may be hiding the drawer. Exclude FunnelKit Cart CSS from minification and switch to a default theme to confirm.

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• Cause 1: The Enable Cart Toggle Is Off
• Cause 2: Icon Visibility Is Set to None
• Cause 3: The Hide Cart Icon Setting Is Active
• Cause 4: Cart Menu Is Not Enabled for Header or Shortcode Placement
• Cause 5: FunnelKit Suppresses the Cart on Certain Page Types
• Cause 6: A Cache Layer Is Serving a Stale Page Without the Cart Scripts
• Cause 7: A Theme or Minification Plugin Is Hiding the Drawer
• Cause 8: Ajax Add to Cart Is Off, So the Drawer Never Triggers
• Worked Example: Diagnosing a FunnelKit Cart Not Showing in Under Five Minutes
• What FunnelKit Cart Cannot Do (Know the Limits Before You Troubleshoot)
• FAQ

The FunnelKit cart not showing on your storefront is one of those problems that looks alarming and is usually embarrassingly simple to fix. The slide-out cart drawer has several independent on/off switches, and any one of them being in the wrong position produces the same symptom: nothing appears. This guide maps every cause to its exact fix, in the order you are most likely to need it.

Cause 1: The Enable Cart Toggle Is Off

This is the most common reason the FunnelKit cart not showing problem strikes people who just installed the plugin or who recently touched settings. The slide-out drawer has a master switch.

Go to FunnelKit > Cart. At the top of the Cart section you will find a toggle that enables or disables the cart entirely. After activation, go to FunnelKit > Cart and turn on the “Enable Cart” toggle button and click on Save. Once you do, if you go to the front end or click “Preview on Page,” you should see a mini cart on your WooCommerce store.

If that toggle is already on and the cart still does not appear, the problem is one of the causes below. Do not skip straight to caching fixes; work through the settings checks first.

Cause 2: Icon Visibility Is Set to None

Even with the cart enabled, the floating icon that triggers the drawer has its own visibility control. If this is set to None, shoppers see nothing and cannot open the cart at all.

Navigate to FunnelKit > Cart > Visibility & Position. The Icon Visibility field gives you three options: Entire Website, WooCommerce Pages, and None. The Icon Visibility option lets you choose the pages on which the cart icon will be visible.

If you set Icon Visibility to None, your cart will not be displayed. That is where you can use the Cart Menu section to embed your cart on your webpage or add it to a menu on your website.

Set it to Entire Website for storewide coverage. If you only want it on shop and product pages, choose WooCommerce Pages. Save, then hard-refresh the front end in an incognito tab.

Also check Icon Position: this setting lets you place the cart icon in the bottom-left or bottom-right corner of your WooCommerce site. If the icon is rendering behind another element, changing the corner can make it visible immediately.

Cause 3: The Hide Cart Icon Setting Is Active

FunnelKit Cart has a separate Hide Cart Icon setting inside the Cart section. This is distinct from the Icon Visibility field. It keeps the cart icon hidden until a shopper adds a product to their cart. If someone enabled this setting and forgot, the icon simply disappears on an empty cart.

Go to FunnelKit > Cart and look for the Hide Cart Icon option. Turn it off, save, and retest. The full settings sub-menu for the Cart section includes dedicated items for Hide Cart Icon, Ajax Add To Cart, Auto Open Side Cart, and more, so it is worth scanning each one if your issue is unusual.

Think of it like a light switch wired to a second switch in series. Both have to be on for the bulb to glow.

Cause 4: Cart Menu Is Not Enabled for Header or Shortcode Placement

If your plan is to show the cart icon inside your site header or via a shortcode rather than as a floating sticky button, the cart visibility settings above are not enough on their own. You also need to enable the Cart Menu and select the right visibility method.

FunnelKit Cart lets you add the WooCommerce sliding cart to your WordPress website by either embedding the cart inside the WordPress menu or via shortcodes. For that, you get options to customize your cart icon and its visibility. First, make sure to enable Cart Menu.

Navigate to FunnelKit > Cart > Cart Menu. Turn on the Enable Cart Menu toggle. From there you can choose how the cart appears by scrolling down to the Visibility Method:

• Add to Menu: Navigate to FunnelKit > Cart > Cart Menu, scroll down to the Visibility Method, and search for the WordPress navigation menu where you want the cart icon to appear. This is the method for getting the cart into your site header.
• Embed Shortcode: Scroll down to the Visibility Method, then copy the [fk_cart_menu] shortcode and paste it anywhere on your WordPress site.

Inside Cart Menu General Settings you can also control what the icon shows: Enable Cart Menu embeds a mini cart inside the WordPress menu or via shortcode. Cart Icon lets you select the icon to display. Show Product Count enables or disables the product count bubble. Show Cart Total enables or disables the total price next to the cart.

Cause 5: FunnelKit Suppresses the Cart on Certain Page Types

This one surprises people. FunnelKit automatically hides the slide-out cart on its own funnel pages, including checkout steps, upsell pages, optin steps, and downsell pages. The cart icon display is excluded on funnel checkout, upsell, and optin step pages. That is intentional: you do not want a floating cart distracting a buyer who is mid-checkout.

FunnelKit landing-page post types (post type wffn_landing) are also excluded by default. If you want the cart on a FunnelKit sales or landing page, you need a code snippet to remove that post type from the exclusion list:

add_filter( 'fkcart_disabled_post_types', function ( $post_types ) {
    $post_types = array_filter(
        $post_types,
        function ( $i ) { return $i != 'wffn_landing'; }
    );
    return $post_types;
} );

Enabling the FunnelKit sliding cart on sales pages is possible but not recommended. Sales pages typically redirect to dedicated checkout pages, and after enabling the cart it will redirect to Store Checkout instead. So read that caveat before you use the snippet: if your landing page has its own checkout flow, the cart redirection may break it.

Add the snippet using Code Snippets or your child theme’s functions.php file. Do not edit the parent theme directly.

If you are also running into checkout-related issues on those pages, see FunnelKit Checkout Not Loading for the parallel set of causes there.

Cause 6: A Cache Layer Is Serving a Stale Page Without the Cart Scripts

Caching is the silent killer of anything that relies on JavaScript fragments. The slide-out cart loads via AJAX. If a caching plugin, CDN, or server-level cache serves a fully static version of your page, the cart scripts never execute and the drawer never appears.

When the side cart does not update after an add-to-cart event, this issue is almost always a caching problem. In your caching plugin, exclude the cart’s AJAX endpoints and the cart fragments from being cached.

WP Rocket is the most common culprit for a more subtle variant. Its “Delay JavaScript Execution” and lazy-render features can prevent the drawer’s scripts from loading. Add the cart plugin’s scripts to WP Rocket’s exclusion list, or disable delayed JS on cart-bearing pages.

The fastest diagnostic: open an incognito window and hard-reload the page (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + R). Incognito bypasses browser cache, and a hard reload bypasses the browser’s disk cache. If none of the other fixes resolve the issue, clear all caches including any server-level or CDN cache and retest in an incognito window.

After clearing cache, if the cart appears for you but not for logged-out visitors, your caching plugin is not excluding dynamic pages correctly. Add your shop and product page URLs to the Never Cache URLs list in your caching plugin’s advanced settings.

Abandoned-cart recovery depends on the cart being captured in the first place, so a caching problem here has a downstream cost. If you are also noticing gaps in cart recovery data, cross-check with FunnelKit Cart Abandonment Not Tracking.

Cause 7: A Theme or Minification Plugin Is Hiding the Drawer

If you cleared all cache and the cart still does not appear, the next suspect is your theme or a CSS/JS optimization plugin. Themes that ship their own mini-cart implementation sometimes output CSS that covers or hides the FunnelKit drawer. Minification plugins can also mangle the cart’s stylesheet, removing the rules that position and reveal the panel.

Your theme’s CSS may be overriding the drawer, or a minification plugin may have mangled its stylesheet. Exclude the cart’s CSS from minification and combination, and clear every cache layer including plugin, server, and CDN before retesting.

To confirm a theme conflict: navigate to Appearance > Themes and switch temporarily to a default WordPress theme such as Twenty Twenty-Four. If the issue gets resolved after switching, you can report it to the Product Support Team to fix the theme-specific issue. This tells you the problem is in your theme, not in FunnelKit Cart itself.

If display issues remain after that, check the Styling tab inside FunnelKit Cart settings. The Styling tab lets you adjust colors (primary color, font color, button color, button text color, upsell box color, link color, reward bar color), border radius, cart preview width on desktop and mobile, animation speed, and icon style options including icon color, background color, notification count color, and icon type. If a theme is pushing a color or width that hides the drawer, correcting those values here can restore visibility without touching your theme files. You can also add custom CSS at the bottom of the Styling tab for anything the preset options do not cover.

Cause 8: Ajax Add to Cart Is Off, So the Drawer Never Triggers

The slide-out cart is designed to open the moment a shopper clicks “Add to Cart.” That behavior depends on AJAX. If Ajax Add to Cart is disabled inside FunnelKit Cart settings, the browser does a full page reload instead of triggering the drawer. The cart itself may technically be on, but shoppers never see it open automatically.

FunnelKit Cart has the option to enable or disable the AJAX-based side cart, letting you configure whether you want to automatically update the cart items without hitting the refresh button or not.

Go to FunnelKit > Cart and find Ajax Add To Cart in the sub-menu. Make sure it is enabled. While you are there, check Auto Open Side Cart: this setting controls whether the drawer slides open automatically on add-to-cart, or whether shoppers have to click the floating icon to open it manually. If Auto Open Side Cart is off, the drawer exists but stays closed until the icon is clicked. That can look like “cart not showing” if your icon is also hidden or positioned off-screen.

Worked Example: Diagnosing a FunnelKit Cart Not Showing in Under Five Minutes

Here is the exact sequence to run through whenever the slide-out cart disappears on a live store. It takes about five minutes top to bottom and covers every cause above without guesswork.

1. Check the master toggle. FunnelKit > Cart. Enable Cart toggle on? If not, turn it on and save. Retest. Done.
2. Check Icon Visibility. FunnelKit > Cart > Visibility & Position. Is Icon Visibility set to None? If yes, change it to Entire Website. Save. Retest.
3. Check Hide Cart Icon. FunnelKit > Cart > Hide Cart Icon sub-section. Is it active? Turn it off. Save.
4. Check Ajax Add to Cart and Auto Open. FunnelKit > Cart. Confirm both Ajax Add To Cart and Auto Open Side Cart are on. Save.
5. Check what page you are on. FunnelKit funnel checkout, upsell, and optin pages intentionally suppress the cart. If you are testing on a landing page, the cart is off by default there too. Test on a standard WooCommerce shop or product page first.
6. Clear all cache layers. Plugin cache, CDN cache, server cache. Then open an incognito window and hard-reload. If the cart appears now, your caching plugin needs to exclude the cart’s AJAX endpoints.
7. Theme check. If the cart still does not appear, switch temporarily to a default theme. If it reappears, the issue is a CSS conflict in your active theme. Check the Styling tab in FunnelKit Cart settings and exclude cart CSS from any minification plugin.
8. Plugin conflict check. If none of the above works, deactivate all non-essential plugins one at a time, retesting after each. When the cart reappears, the last plugin you deactivated is the conflict source. Report it to FunnelKit support.

If you also run FunnelKit Automations for cart recovery, remember that a cart the shopper never opened may not get captured as a recoverable cart. See FunnelKit Abandoned Cart Emails Not Sending for how those two issues intersect.

What FunnelKit Cart Cannot Do (Know the Limits Before You Troubleshoot)

A few things that look like bugs are actually by design. Knowing them saves you an hour of debugging.

• It does not show on FunnelKit funnel steps. Checkout pages, upsell pages, and optin steps suppress the cart by design. That is intentional, not a bug. You can override this with a filter hook for landing pages, but you should understand the redirect implications first.
• It does not replace the WooCommerce checkout flow on its own. The cart drawer gets shoppers to checkout faster, but it still hands off to whatever checkout you have configured. If that checkout has problems, see FunnelKit Checkout Not Loading.
• It does not fix a misconfigured coupon field. If coupons apply but do not reflect correctly in the cart, that is a separate issue. Check FunnelKit Coupon Not Applying.
• The judgment on cache exclusion rules stays with you. Every hosting environment is different. FunnelKit cannot know your server-level cache configuration. You need to verify the exclusion rules in your specific caching plugin and CDN manually.

FAQ

funnelkit cart not showing after enabling

The most common cause after enabling is Icon Visibility being set to None under FunnelKit > Cart > Visibility & Position. Change it to Entire Website, save, and hard-refresh in an incognito window. Also confirm Ajax Add To Cart is on and that you are not testing on a FunnelKit funnel step page, where the cart is suppressed by design.

funnelkit slide cart not opening when add to cart is clicked

This usually means Auto Open Side Cart is disabled. Go to FunnelKit > Cart and enable the Auto Open Side Cart setting. Also confirm Ajax Add To Cart is on. Without AJAX, clicking Add to Cart triggers a full page reload instead of opening the drawer.

funnelkit cart icon not visible in header

The floating sticky icon and the header icon are two separate systems. For a header icon you need to enable Cart Menu under FunnelKit > Cart > Cart Menu, then scroll down to the Visibility Method, select Add to Menu, and pick the WordPress navigation menu where you want the icon to appear. Alternatively, paste the [fk_cart_menu] shortcode into a custom header element.

funnelkit cart not showing on landing pages or sales funnel pages

FunnelKit suppresses the slide cart on its own funnel landing-page post types by default. You can override this with the fkcart_disabled_post_types filter hook to remove the wffn_landing post type from the exclusion list. Be aware that enabling the cart on sales pages will redirect to Store Checkout rather than the funnel’s dedicated checkout page.

funnelkit sliding cart disappears after caching plugin installed

Your caching plugin is likely serving a static page that does not execute the cart’s AJAX scripts. Exclude the cart’s AJAX endpoints and fragment URLs from caching, and if you use WP Rocket, add the cart plugin’s scripts to the Delay JavaScript Execution exclusion list. Clear all cache layers including CDN, then retest in incognito.

funnelkit cart not showing on mobile

First check that your Icon Visibility is set to Entire Website rather than WooCommerce Pages, then look at the Styling tab inside FunnelKit Cart settings and confirm the cart preview width is set for mobile devices. A theme CSS override is also common on mobile: switch to a default theme temporarily to rule that out.

Sources:

Brian Kasday spent forty years in direct-response marketing before rebuilding the whole operation as a one-person shop. He writes The Operator’s Library — including “The Missing Manual for FunnelKit” — for operators who’d rather build it themselves than wait on someone else.

Get the Builder’s Companion Kit — the free checklists and templates that pair with this guide: mmsvegas.com/op/funnelkit-resources/.

This guide fixes one FunnelKit step. The Missing Manual for FunnelKit covers the whole checkout system. See the manual →