Manage inventory presentation and insights

Offer Grid and List inventory views

The native inventory archive offers Grid and List controls above the results. Grid is the default. List places the vehicle photo beside its details and stacks vertically on screens 600px wide or narrower.

Switching views retains the active filters, sort choice, and current page. Filtering, pagination, and resetting filters also retain the selected view. The controls work without JavaScript.

The URL parameter inventory_view=list selects List directly. Missing or unsupported values use Grid. This choice applies to the native archive; homepage carousels, related vehicles, shortcodes, and Elementor grids keep their configured layouts.

Add a vehicle video

1. Edit a vehicle.
2. Find Vehicle video.
3. Paste a supported YouTube watch, share, Shorts, live, or embed URL.
4. Update the vehicle and view its public page.

LotPress normalizes supported URLs and renders the player from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain. The visitor’s browser still connects to YouTube when the player loads, so describe that external service in the dealership privacy notice.

The Video section must also be visible under Inventory → Vehicle Display.

Review the social-sharing preview

For public vehicle pages, LotPress supplies vehicle-specific Open Graph and X/Twitter large-card metadata when a supported SEO plugin is not already responsible for that output. It prefers the primary vehicle photo and falls back to the LotPress placeholder when no verified image is available.

To inspect the built-in approximation without relying on a social-network cache, append ?lotpress_social_preview=1 to the public vehicle URL. For example:

https://example.com/inventory/example-vehicle/?lotpress_social_preview=1

The preview checks the title, description, site name, and selected image. Individual platforms may crop or typeset the final card differently. If an old card remains visible after changing a photo, use that platform’s sharing debugger or wait for its crawler cache to refresh.

Read first-party inventory insights

Open Inventory → Overview to review aggregate vehicle-detail views and inquiry-button clicks for active inventory. Use the drill-down tables to identify the vehicles receiving those interactions.

A browser-session key prevents the same vehicle view from being counted repeatedly during one session. LotPress stores the aggregate totals in WordPress post metadata and does not send them to LotPress or an external analytics service. Treat the totals as directional interest signals rather than unique-person or sales-attribution reports.

Regenerate optimized vehicle images

LotPress creates optimized derivatives in the background after vehicle saves while preserving the original uploads. After migrating a site, restoring uploads, or changing image support on the server, an administrator with WP-CLI access can rebuild the expected derivatives:

wp lotpress images regenerate

Run the command from the WordPress installation directory after creating a current backup. It reports a failure when uploads are not writable, WebP support is unavailable, or an expected file cannot be generated. Correct the reported server or filesystem problem and run it again; do not delete the original vehicle images.

Troubleshoot photo and thumbnail problems

• No card image: confirm the vehicle has a primary photo and that the attachment still exists.
• Broken image after migration: verify that the complete uploads directory moved and that attachment URLs use the current domain.
• Unexpected crop: review the configured vehicle thumbnail aspect ratio and regenerate derivatives when needed.
• Soft or undersized social card: use a clear landscape primary photo large enough for a 1200-pixel-wide preview.
• Old image persists: clear WordPress, hosting, and CDN caches, then refresh the relevant social-network crawler cache.
• Custom theme behaves differently: check whether it overrides the LotPress vehicle card or image markup.