Home page does not load until refresh

I can only see one plugin right now… auto optimize and that should be okay.

I see you’re on Hostgator with CloudFlare.

The site loaded in my Chrome browser just fine.

I’m wondering if the Nginx proxy at Hostgator and CloudFlare itself might benefit from cache control headers… you might want to install a cache controller like W3 Total Cache or cache enabler just to get the headers. You’ll get a slight boost just having W3 at default settings or the Cache Enabler.

Your images are way too big! Anytime you have to visibly shrink an image you need to consider using a cropped or shrunken image instead. A little tweak is fine but you can save a lot of image load delay by using an image closer to what your presentation needs.

Lazy Load might help too as those big fat images are loading while the ‘above the fold’ part of your site is still trying to present.

Also, there’s something called https://piio.co/ that is throwing an error and sounds like your 14 day free trial is up.

Between your host’s Nginx Proxy and CloudFlare I think you could do (undo?) whatever to get rid of that service. It seems to be throwing 404 errors.

Hi! Thanks so much for the quick answer!
So, I got rid of the Piio thing and still get the issue. From what I understand it is CSS-related but I do not know how to fix it. I think I bring this to Autoptimize as I think this is the source of the issue and disabling it does not fix it.

Thanks again

You can always try to disable just CSS or just JS of just HTML or just Image optimization to isolate the problem, but if the problem persists when AO is disabled, then the issue is with the original CSS (or JS) of your theme or plugins haskins (which AO just combines & minifies)?

frank (ao dev)

I did try to disable these options (but maybe I did it something wrong). The issue is that even with AO disabled the problem is still there and that the website worked just fine 2 days ago.
I can see that when I look at the page source, the code is completely different from when the page doesn’t work and is refreshed. I just don’t have the ability to look into this.

indeed, looks like a stale page cache somehow which is pointing to Autoptimized resources that don’t exist any more?

I haven’t deleted any page recently. When I change the home page in WP to be redirected to a different one, the first load still fails and the refresh works to the new home page. So I do not think it comes from the design of the page in itself but “just” the code. Is there something I can do to restore the CSS maybe? I tried with elementor but it didn’t do much.

no, you can’t really restore files that were deleted from AO’s cache. you could fake it though, finding the filename of the autoptimized CSS-file for the page that works and copying it into a 2nd file with the filename of the autoptimized CSS-file for the page that does not work? B-)

I like the enthusiasm ?? However, how do I do that? :/

with an (s)ftp client, you hoster’s cpanel (or similar) or using a file manager plugin? ??

Ah! I think it works now after asking my host to clear the cache on its end! God damn it that was stupid ??

all is well that purges well ??

Hi,

I have been having this issue as well, the site only loading correctly once refreshed.

The site was looking for a file that was no longer there https://www.wingchunhalesowen.co.uk/wp-content/cache/autoptimize/css/autoptimize_91440aac7bed72a905a06dc83b97248a.css

I had deleted all files in the /httpdocs/wp-content/cache/autoptimize/ but on load it was still looking for the cache css file

Looking at the above thread and the issue I was having it turns out that Enable nginx caching was active on the server causing the problem.

Turning this setting off via the server control panel sorted the issue and the site now runs perfectly and everything loads correctly.

I just wanted to add this reply as it seemed that the Autoptimize plugin was the issue but wasn’t and it might help other

Regards
Alan

if you delete files from the Autoptimize cache you have to also clear the page cache (in this case; nginx) Alan, no need to disable page caching if you do it that way ??