Background: I have published a web site with a custom shop storefront Page, and erroneously left the WooCommerce "shop page" setting empty. While this produced the expected results on our local development environment, after pushing the files and database to our web hosting environment I encountered inconsistencies with handling of rewrite_rules. I had to correct this problem as per the directives provided in this previous Question/Answer: WooCommerce Permalinks: Rewrite Rules not generating as expected
Zain's answer worked, however the custom shop page I designed is now mishandling the product permalink custom base. This page was created using our (Avada) theme's "Fusion builder" (a WYSIWYG interface) which provides various "Elements" to choose and configure when designing a page.
In this case, I chose a design Element (named "Post Cards") which I configured to display the products in a grid. This was achieved by using the WYSIWYG interface to build a query whereby the post type selected is "Products" and the taxonomy selected is "Product Categories", with several categories selected for inclusion.
The interface also allows me to specify how many products will appear before the user is offered a "load more" button. When pressed, this button is supposed to render additional rows below what was displayed when the page was loaded.
For whatever reason, this "Element" of our page builder is now telling WordPress to run a query which only returns a number of products equal to the number of grid slots (rows / columns) visible when the page is loaded. Pressing "Load more Products" yields the error message "No additional items found."
Yet, if I increase the number of products to be initially displayed from 6 to 60, the Element renders all 35 of our products on the first page load.
I tried changing the product Permalink base to /product/ instead of /shop/, suspecting a conflict because the page which contains this custom storefront code also has a slug of /shop/. Using /shop/ as both a Page slug and as the product permalink base did not create problems on our local environment.
However, when I try changing the product permalink base from /shop/ to /product/ (the default), the Page I built at /shop/ begins to correctly load all of our products without any of the problems I mentioned.
But, changing the product permalink back to /shop/ again returns the storefront Page I designed with a slug of /shop/ to the broken state I described.
What could be responsible for this?