Twitter cards suddenly not validating

Thanks for reaching out here. We are sorry to hear that you’re having trouble with Twitter cards.

We looked at the relevant page and were able to reproduce the issue when using the Twitter card validator.

We can confirm the error you’re seeing ERROR: Failed to fetch page due to: HttpConnectionTimeout in Twitter card validator isn’t specific to Yoast SEO but specific to Twitter and your site. The Twitter bot is unable to access your website to the HTTP timeout issue which may occur when there’s a connection issue between the relevant two paths.

That said, when looking at the robots.txt on your website we see that it includes the following crawl rules:

User-agent: Twitterbot
Disallow:
Allow: /

While this may not be directly related, we still want you to remove them from the robots.txt of your website. You could edit the robots.txt using Yoast SEO (SEO → Tools → File Editor.) Once you remove the relevant crawl rules, try validating the relevant page again using the Twitter card validator to see whether this resolves the issue for you.

Thanks for the quick reply. I’ve removed the lines from robot.txt but it hasn’t made any difference. I’d only added it recently once the error came up to see if it helped the issue, but it hasn’t. At a loss how to solve this, it’s causing a massive drop in enagement and visits.

We are afraid to say that we are out of clue at this point as well. However, we can confirm that it’s not something specific to Yoast SEO. You could even try disabling Yoast SEO temporarily and use the Twitter card validator to see whether the relevant error persists (we believe it would.) So, it’s best to reach out to your web hosting provider as the Twitter bot seems can’t visit your website.

Thanks again, really appreciate it!