Some website visitors - not all - see our website loading https://www.mediate.com, but it never fully loads. No error message is displayed, just a white page as the site continues to load. The user CAN get the site to load if they do a hard refresh, but of course not all people even know that’s an option or that it might be a solution to the problem. The problem fixes itself if I flush the Cloudflare cache, but then it returns later. You’ll see him trying to load the site in Firefox and Chrome on a PC but the site won’t load. If he does a hard refresh, it does load. He reported that he did NOT have this problem with Microsoft Edge. I don’t know what that means. I have a colleague who experiences this, and I have a video of this (very small video). https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yHO3Bke5ZhA3cQMzFU1ZKMZDyfGbh2-d/view?usp=sharing
This line “You’ll see him trying to load the site in Firefox and Chrome on a PC but the site won’t load. If he does a hard refresh, it does load. He reported that he did NOT have this problem with Microsoft Edge. I don’t know what that means.” was meant to be after the sentence of the video. Describes the experience of my colleague.
Hi,
It looks like some of your visitors are being challenged. I got this when I visited your domain (and I was using Edge, so I don’t think it’s browser-specific.):
<html><head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;/.well-known/sgcaptcha/?r=%2F"></meta></head></html>
And in fact this won’t even load a challenge, just shows a blank screen that is refreshing itself in a loop.
That, however, is not a Cloudflare challenge. So you should check your installation for any possible origin-side firewall that is presenting the challenge.
Thanks! That’s great insight. Why should it resolve itself for users if I purge the Cloudflare cache, though?
Because you’re using APO, which caches your site. If it caches that broken page for a challenged user, that’s what others will see.
Because you have set Cloudflare to cache HTML (that’s mainly what APO for WordPress does) and the response from your origin is a valid, cacheable 200 HTML with that meta refresh instruction as its content , You need to talk to whoever is responsible for that firewall (plugin developer, your hosting support etc.) to see what can be done to either disable it or set it in a way that would make it not cacheable.
You were correct - our site is hosted at Siteground, and it turns out they filter all traffic to their servers using an AI driven bot, and they were interpreting the cacheing attempt by Cloudflare as malicious. Cloudflare cached the resulting page as you noted.
I had to request that Siteground turn it off the bot, which they did, and that fixed it.
I appreciate your help!
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