Search Console unable to load pages properly

[blackswan79]

First of all, sorry for my english (not my main language).

In the last days I have got some errors in Google Search Console: pages not ready for mobile because of small text and clickable elements to close, for exemple.

This happens because GSC is not beeing able to load my page correctly. It's shows something like this:

[screencast.com...]

Any ideia about why this is happenng?

CDN, Cache, CSS, Javascript?

Thank You very much for your oppinions!

[lucy24]

Eeuw. That certainly looks like a missing stylesheet. Does GSC say explicitly that it was unable to load something--and if so, what? Whether they said anything or not, check your access logs for that exact time. See whether they requested everything they were supposed to request, and whether everything got the intended response. (If there is any rewriting involved, be sure to check the size of the response as well.)

Hypothesis: Your site redirects, and/or serves different stylesheets depending on user-agent, but GSC sent a generic (not smartphone) UA with the request, resulting in the wrong stylesheets being sent. But that, as I said, is just a hypothesis. First you need to gather all the information you can possibly get.

[dennisjensen]

I feel compelled to ad my two cents. We have a test site right now: On G's mobile friendliness test it looks a lot like what's on your screen dump. Go here to investigate what's not loaded in your case. We're lokking at JS, CSS or a combo.

[Wilburforce]

I personally get that problem intermittently (but fairly frequently) on G's mobile-friendly test, where it vanishes on retesting a minute later. It is always possible that there was simply a timeout when Google tried to load something, and that it has been logged in GSC. That is more likely if the page loads and displays correctly in a range of browsers on a range of devices.

However, I agree with lucy24 - it looks like a missing stylesheet, and assuming it wasn't just a timeout your best bet is to audit your own page dependencies (a site link-checker is useful, and there are several free ones around): if everything passes the link-test the problem is on Google's side and you can probably safely ignore it. If not, you can correct it.

Another possibility to consider is that something is blocking Google's access to a page resource: in the old days I did that deliberately on my own site, and if anyone (or any process) has done it on your page/site then that might cause the same symptoms.

[Wilburforce]

there is a URL Google is aware of on your site with noindex meta tag

No, that wouldn't cause this: noindex doesn't block access.

What this means is that at the time of the mobile-friendly test Google could not access one or more page resources. Either:

1. The problem is temporary (a timeout or server-glitch has caused it) or
2. The problem is caused by a configuration error (there is a broken link to a page resource or the resource does not load or function correctly) or
3. Google's access to the resource is blocked by a directive.

_{Edit: this was a reply to a post that has been removed, although the substance of it still applies.}

[HereWeGo123]

I just submitted a new thread re: the same issue before I saw this one. I'm also having sporadic errors when inspecting a URL showing that Google wasn't able to load our CSS, Javascript files due to redirection errors, along with many images throughout the inspected URL, even though we clearly specify the full CSS and Javascript path in the HTML files across the board. While the errors with Google not being able to load the CSS/JS files are sporadic, though frequent, we do get errors for each URL inspected that some of the images could not be loaded due to 'other errors' 100% of the time. And as BlackSwan79 mentioned, when inspecting the URL via the Google's public Mobile Friendly test, it shows no errors. This is purely in the new GSC. We have been investigating and cannot seem to isolate any underlying issues. One speculatory thought I have is that it may be due to Cloudflare? But they are not really of much help at this point. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

[sim64]

I'm having similar when using the URL inspection tool in search console.

It sporadically says resources are blocked, most the time images, but sometimes scripts and stylesheets which then leads to the not mobile friendly errors.

Nothing in my Robot.txt is blocking anything and the fact it is just random leads me to think it is either a search console error or my hosting is dropping off as Search console is trying to fetch the page.

All other tools like speed test, pingdom, header checkers, page checkers, etc. report no problems and pages always appear to load fine

Anyone have any ideas as to what problem could be?