Paypal processing not completing

@apeacewithin Thanks for reaching out.

That is odd. Normally when you submit the donation form it should go to PayPal. Let’s try a few things:

1. Do you have another payment gateway available? Can you test this with offline payment gateway and see if your test payment goes to a receipt page or the login page?
2. Can you deactivate all plugin BUT Charitable, switch to a default WordPress them, clear permalinks (if you don’t know how, this provides some ways to do this https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-regenerate-your-permalinks-in-wordpress/ ). Then repeat the donation test.
3. You can enable WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG and examine to see if any errors are being recorded by WordPress during the test. Here’s a guide to enable this https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-easily-enable-wordpress-debug-mode-to-fix-site-errors/ – the debug.log file (usually in the wp-content folder, or visible by a plugin) would be the file to look at. Fatal errors or PHP warnings might hold a clue here.

By the initial looks of things, you might have a plugin or some sort of conflict. Feel free to share if you get any results from the above and feel free to share a public link for us to examine, although not much troubleshooting can be done – but we are always willing to try. 🙂

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Hi @apeacewithin

Thank you for that follow-up. That is very helpful information.

Knowing that Stripe works correctly tells us the problem is isolated specifically to the PayPal gateway integration and is not a general form issue. The “pending payments” you see confirm that Charitable is creating the donation, but the critical redirect to PayPal is failing (and incorrectly sending you to the login page – i assume that’s still happening?).

This behavior is most often caused by a plugin or theme conflict, especially security, caching, or membership plugins that can interfere with outgoing redirects.

You didn’t mention this in the reply so can you confirm you tried this?

1. Deactivate all plugins except Charitable.
2. Switch to a default WordPress theme (like Twenty Twenty-Four).
3. Test the PayPal donation again.

If it works, you can reactivate your theme and other plugins one by one, testing after each, until the problem returns. That will identify the source of the conflict. Also make sure WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG are true and we can check there for any clues as well.

Let me know what you find. Thanks!