General Website Troubleshooting Steps
Updated at: Oct 13, 2024
Are you having trouble with a particular website? Trouble with every website? Here's a list of general purpose troubleshooting steps that you can take which might help. They're not going to fix every problem, but they're some good "First steps" to take and they might just fix your problem straight away.
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Refresh the page
Sometimes when you load a webpage, things just don't work quite right - for too many reasons to list, a page might just simply not load correctly the first time. So the first thing to try is simply reloading the page. Forcing a complete refresh of a page tells your web browser to try downloading and displaying everything again.
Follow the guide to forcing your web browser to fully reload a webpage for instructions on how to do it with your web browser.
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Make sure JavaScript is enabled
While all websites should aim to work as best as possible without relying on JavaScript, the fact is that most websites these days do unfortunately require JavaScript to be enabled. If you don't have JavaScript enabled then some websites won't load at all, or will only partially load, so making sure you've got it enabled in your web browser is a good place to start.
Start by checking our detection page to find out: is JavaScript enabled? If it's not enabled in your browser, here are some guides to help you enable JavaScript. This alone might be enough to fix a website that's not loading properly or looking weird.
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Make sure Cookies are enabled
The next step is to check whether cookies are enabled. You should only ever need "First-party cookies" enabled ("Third-party cookies" are only usually used by advertisers and social network trackers) - but if you need to, you can check if Third Party cookies are enabled as well.
If normal/first-party cookies aren't enabled in your browser, you can try enabling them to see if it helps. follow the guides to enable cookies.
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Clear your cache and cookies
When your web browser loads the pages that you look at, it normally stores a copy of the files it uses to show these pages on your computer/phone. This helps speed up your browsing, because if you reload the page it doesn't have to download everything again. And also, if you go to a different page on the same website it doesn't have to re-download everything to make the page work - for example, the logo and the icons are already temporarily stored on your computer so it doesn't need to waste time and data re-downloading them.
Normally this is great because it saves your browser from having to keep re-downloading common elements of the site. However if the collection of cached temporary files gets out of sync with the live website, it can cause problems. You can fix this by clearing your cache and cookies.
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Make sure your web browser is up to date
If you're using a very old web browser then it might be having trouble working with modern websites. First, check if your web browser is up to date and if it isn't, follow the instructions to update your web browser.
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Restart your web browser
It might sound strange that simply restarting your web browser might solve the problem you're having with a website, but web browsers occasionally do just get a bit "mixed up" - we've found that restarting them is a simple and quick way of going back to a more "fresh" state, so give it a go.
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Try a different web browser
Not all web browsers are created equally - some have more features than others, and some might have bugs or limitations with certain features that prevent some websites from working properly.
You might be trying to use a website that's just not built to work well with your web browser, so you might need to try a different web browser and see if the website you're having trouble with works in it instead.
Next steps
If you're still having trouble with a website, you can browse our list of website tutorials to find a fix.
I hope this guide helped you.
