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Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
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I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution.
- Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions
- Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container
- Happens while on the company network, as well as externally
- Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer
- We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps
- Codebase is .net
Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it.
I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz
Linking to an image example below
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Thanks Gazzerman - This helps as well. Yes, I agree the site definitely needs SEO attention. It was not until recently that a more experience team was brought on to 'fix the site'.
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I took one look at the code and was amazed by how much is inline. Most of it should be in js and css files. I noticed the solutions pages many of them don't even have title tags! What's going on there? That needs seo attention and is a big no no for coding. This leads me to believe the code needs very close inspection. It surly cant take that long to strip a whole bunch of that code out of each page or template.
If a page is slow to load or pulls in external js files as well you can have scripts try to execute before the required code has loaded. This is probably what is happening some of the time and would explain the inconsistent nature of it.
Run the site through a bunch of validators. I am sure you will find a bunch of stuff.
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Oddly enough it only seemed to happen on the /Servers page - for me at least. The first time I loaded the page, I got a broken image and an X-Out/Close box. That may help you hone in on the problem.
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Travis - Thanks for your response. This gives me a better idea of where to start looking. Honestly this site was very poorly developed in my opinion. It was before my time and much of it outsourced to junior teams overseas, which is evident when looking at the source code. But I am stuck with it for now.
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Found the site. I'm able to recreate the problem. Check the image attachment.
I ran it through tools.pingdom.com, a chrome extension called cast_sender.js isn't loading. But something makes me think there's an issue with the CSS that only crops up from time to time, like the JS blocks it every once in a while. There's both a Global.css and a Global.js in the head. There are also folder levels called /Script%20Library/ and /Style%20Library/.
There's a ton of JavaScript on the site, which I don't have time to get into. And honestly, I'm more of a WordPress guy. I managed to make the page load fail a few times out of a dozen or so tries. I think something in the JavaScript is causing the issue.
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