Bug report: Inline Font Icons blocking Google crawler

  • Elementor has a performance feature called “Inline Font Icons” which renders icons as SVGs without loading the font awesome library and related CSS and fonts. When this feature is enabled it causes minification issues which can block Google crawler.

    Details: When Inline Font Icons is enabled in Elementor it causes the JS minifier in the Autoptimize plugin to crash when the optimize html code setting and also minify inline JS/CSS setting are enabled. The crash does not affect anything in the frontend experience but it causes Google crawling to fail by returning a server 500 error in Search console. My guess is one or more SVG strings is improperly closed or has issues with escaping characters.

    More details in this thread: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/autoptimize-blocking-google-crawler/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support Milos

    (@miloss84)

    Hello there,

    Thank you for your patience!.

    Would it be possible for you to tell us more details about your issue, can you please provide us with a screencast demonstrating the issue?

    This will be useful to us as we will better understand the issue you’re experiencing and provide you with better support.

    I am looking forward to your reply!

    Kind Regards,

    Thread Starter awesiome

    (@awesiome)

    I have provided as much detail as possible. The exact feature is the inline icons feature, then in the thread that I linked in my previous post you can find the PHP error that is generated with the Autoptimize plugin which may give you a better idea of what exactly is going wrong. Beyond that I can’t really provide more information since I’m not a dev. There is no need really to make a screencast of Google search console failing. It returns an Error 5xx message (server error) message when it attempts to crawl if both autoptimize and inline icons in Elementor are enabled. No issue if autoptimize is disabled. But considering that autoptimize is active on a ton of sites it seems a big deal.

    Plugin Support Elementor Team

    (@ricav)

    Hi there,

    Thank you for the additional details, and I understand the situation more clearly now.

    The conflict you’re experiencing between the Autoptimize plugin and the inline icons feature in Elementor appears to be causing a server error (Error 5xx) when Google tries to crawl your site. Since the issue is resolved when Autoptimize is disabled, it seems that there’s likely an incompatibility between how Autoptimize handles certain resources and Elementor’s inline icons feature.

    Autoptimize is indeed widely used, so this is something important to address. I would recommend the following steps to troubleshoot and potentially resolve the issue:

    1. Try Excluding Inline Icons from Autoptimize: You can try excluding the specific scripts or resources related to Elementor’s inline icons from being optimized by Autoptimize. This can sometimes resolve conflicts between plugins without needing to fully disable Autoptimize.
    2. Check for Plugin Updates: Ensure both Elementor and Autoptimize are up-to-date, as compatibility issues are often resolved in newer versions.
    3. Contact Autoptimize Support: Since this issue seems directly related to how Autoptimize processes the inline icons, reaching out to their support team could help. They may be aware of the conflict and offer a more specific solution.

    Let me know if you need any help with these steps, and we’ll be happy to assist further!

    Best regards,

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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