WooCommerce Checkout Stuck on an Infinite Spinner? Causes & Fix

The customer clicks Place order, the form greys out, and the spinner never stops. No error, no order, no explanation. Almost always the checkout request never came back — and your browser's Network tab will tell you in about ten seconds which of two very different bugs you have.

Last updated: 16 Jul 2026 · ~7 min read

Which spinner are you actually looking at?

WooCommerce greys the form out the moment you click Place order, then POSTs to wc-ajax=checkout and waits. Every path that ends the wait — success, validation failure, even a server error — removes the overlay. So an overlay that never lifts means the wait never ended: either the response never arrived, or the request was never sent in the first place. That distinction is the whole diagnosis, and it takes one look at the Network tab.

Before you go further, check where the spinner is. A spinner over the order review table — the totals panel on the right, spinning before you click anything — is a different request (wc-ajax=update_order_review) and a different problem. A spinner over the whole form after clicking Place order is the one this guide is about. Owners routinely report the first and get sent to fix the second.

The most common causes (most likely first)

1. The wc-ajax=checkout request hangs and never returnsNetwork tab shows wc-ajax=checkout stuck on pending — for a minute, for five minutes, forever. Something on the server is blocked: a gateway API call with no timeout of its own, a slow query, or a hook running past PHP's max execution time. WooCommerce sets no timeout on this request, so nothing ever gives up.
2. The gateway's JavaScript blocked the form and never released itNetwork tab shows no wc-ajax=checkout request at all — and there's a JavaScript error in the console. The form is greyed the instant you click, before any request fires, so a gateway script that intercepts the submit (for 3D Secure, SCA, tokenisation) and then fails leaves you blocked forever. A blocked popup, a CSP rule blocking the gateway's iframe, or a script that 404s all land here.
3. It's the order review spinner, not the checkout spinnerThe spinner is over the totals panel and appears before you click Place order — often after changing an address or a shipping option. That's wc-ajax=update_order_review failing, and the Place order button is blocked as a side effect.
4. The order was placed and the redirect target is hangingThe order is sitting in WooCommerce → Orders, but the customer's spinner never went away. The checkout succeeded and returned a redirect; the order-received page then timed out or fatalled. Payment may well have been taken — treat this as a money problem, not a checkout problem.
5. A fatal error is corrupting the responseThe browser console logs Unable to fix malformed JSON. A PHP warning, notice or fatal has printed into the response alongside WooCommerce's JSON. Check WooCommerce → Status → Logs and your server's PHP error log for a fatal at that exact timestamp.
6. You're on the block checkout, so it isn't wc-ajax at allNetwork tab shows a POST to /wp-json/wc/store/v1/checkout instead. The block checkout uses the Store API, so the endpoint, the error handling and the log entries are all different — don't go hunting for a wc-ajax request that will never exist.

Where to look first

• Open the browser Network tab first, then click Place order. Everything below branches off what you see — don't touch a setting until you've looked.
• Is there a wc-ajax=checkout request stuck pending? That's cause 1 — the server is hung. Go to WooCommerce → Status → Logs and your PHP error log, look for a timeout or fatal at that timestamp, and suspect whatever runs during the checkout process — a gateway call, a tax or shipping lookup, a CRM or ERP sync hooked to order creation.
• Is there no request at all? That's cause 2 — the server never even heard from the customer. Check the browser console for a JavaScript error and look at which gateway is selected. Switch to a simple method like cash on delivery and retest: if that submits fine, it's the gateway's script, not your checkout.
• Is the spinner on the totals panel rather than the form? That's cause 3 — look for update_order_review in the Network tab instead, and check the response it returns.
• Check WooCommerce → Orders before you do anything else. If the order is actually there, the checkout worked and the redirect is the problem (cause 4) — and the customer may already have been charged. Verify against your gateway dashboard rather than assuming the sale failed.

How to know you fixed it

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