Want to use the MailChimp WP Subscribe form on the default WordPress Twenty-seventeen theme?

Then you have a problem. The Home page is sectional pages in the customizer. You ask, “That’s a problem? How so?” Choosing this customization, sacrifices home-page sidebars – and thus no standard widget areas. Widgets are only allowed on posts. Here’s our journey to find a workaround  solution:

We ran into a problem using WP Subscribe on a test site. There, we used the default WordPress Twenty-seventeen theme. Notice during the test (image above), we got a 404-error message. “The requested resource could not be found.” Why was this happening? The same form worked fine on PagePipe.com. We’ve verified the MailChimp API key and the widget matched. It was Kosher.

The Twenty-seventeen theme has a surprise built-in dilemma. You customize the theme home page with optional front-page sections. These allow parallax scrolling images between sections. Nice. Thank you very much. But Twenty-seventeen theme doesn’t allow sidebar widgets on pages. Only posts allow that. Therein lies the problem [disapproval – Boo!]. Since WP Subscribe is in a widget area, we tried using a workaround to place the signup at top, front, and center.

There are various plugins that can help create a widget area inside a page. We thought we’d be clever and use one of those. Failure!

We tried first a plugin called Widgets on a Page. We disabled all other plugins except “WP Subscribe” and “Widgets on Page” plugins. The same 404 error message still reappeared with another test.

Widgets-on-Page plugin is superseded with Turbo-Widgets plugin. But it doesn’t allow editing of the WP Subscribe settings. Widgets on Page is still maintained and last updated 3 weeks ago and has 70,000+ installs. It is compatible with WP 4.7.3 – which we’re using. We suspect this combination of plugins is corrupting code somewhere. And we mean permanently altered – as in undoable.

To remove variables, we tested this errant plugin combination back on PagePipe.com. The result was the same 404 error message. We removed “Widget on Page” plugin. The results on all sidebar signup forms – that formerly worked fine. Errors galore. Corruption of the plugin database.

On PagePipe.com, because the WP Plugin database was now corrupted. That forced us to reinstalled a recent site backup. That cleared the errors. That was a harsh lesson.

We also investigated AMR Shortcode Any Widget as a workaround to embed a widget. Further testing on PagePipe revealed more. The “AMR shortcode any widget” plugin fails also (unknown error, call etc) when embedding the WP Subscribe plugin widget. But it doesn’t corrupt sidebar widget versions of WP Subscribe. We didn’t have to reinstall backups. No corruption. Whew!

https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-shortcode/

This plugin also fails but not destructively. We finally ran out of widget embedding options.

Because of these problems, we switched to “YIKES Easy Forms for MailChimp” plugin (freebie). 50,000+ installs, 3.7M download size. You can place its shortcode on the front page of the Twenty-seventeen theme. That’s the secret fix. Now you can place a MailChimp signup on default Twenty-seventeen theme pages. Note: In spite of it’s massive plugin download weight (11.5MB decompressed), it is a lightweight plugin and doesn’t bog down page speed. Much of the weight (8M) is in SVG image files for international flag icons. What?! Silliness.

The good news is with a Autoptimize minification plugin installed, this final signup form only added 36 milliseconds to site drag. This is 20 times faster than other alternatives – like iContact.