Two WordPress plugins that wiped blog posts: conflict worked around

On a regional German agency’s own WordPress site, some blog posts showed their contact section twice, and deleting the extra copy in the page builder wiped the whole post. In March 2024 the agency asked me for the cause.

I reproduced it: the section broke only when inserted as a reusable block, while the same element inserted directly worked. The cause was the related-posts plugin, which counted reusable blocks as posts and could exclude content only by category or tag, and reusable blocks have neither. I didn’t patch either plugin, so the next update can’t undo the fix. In the affected posts I replaced the reusable block with the block’s own shortcodes, copied in the builder’s classic mode, and left other pages alone. I explained the cause and the fix to the agency and left the other posts using the block to them.

The affected posts show the section once and can be edited safely. In September 2026 the same post still showed it once, as plain shortcodes.