Failed to create critical CSS – Retry doesn’t work

Hi @florismk,

Thank you for writing. I am shown that the Critical CSS was successfully generated on your site a few days ago las time. Does it mean the issue fixed itself already? Can you please give it another try and see if generating Critical CSS works now?

Looking forward to hearing back from you.

Hi @alinclamba , as I wrote, the CSS was succesfully generated in the end, but it took nine attempts, and the frequency of failed attempts seems to be increasing.

Hi @florismk,

This is something we’d be more than happy to investigate further. Please continue to monitor the situation, and if it occurs again, don’t hesitate to reach out by starting a new support thread. For now, I will mark this issue as resolved.

Best!

Thans @alinclamba . I noticed in other threads about similar issues that your colleagues were investigating apparent increasing occurrence of this problem, that’s why I reported it.

Thank you for the update, and I’m sorry to hear this problem has re-occurred.

I’ve escalated it to our developers so they can investigate further. We’ll get back to you soon!

Hello again!

We noticed that you are using WordFence, which can sometimes interfere with Jetpack Boost. As a test, could you try temporarily disabling WordFence and then see if you get the same error when generating Critical CSS?

Hello @florismk,

I’m following to check if you were able to go through the troubleshooting steps my colleague suggested above. Let us know if WordFence was in any way interfering with your Jetpack Boost setup.

Look forward to hearing from you!

Sorry, forgot to follow up.

Just tried it: disabled WordFence, after which Boost suggested renewing the critical CSS. Failed on the first attempt again, and on the second atempt. So it’s not WordFence interfering.

Btw, the alert counter Boost displays after changes gets increased after a second change. So in this case, I disabled WordFence, got the alert counter, attempted to regenerate CSS, which failed. (Had it succeeded, the alert would have disappeared.) Reactivated WordFence, and the alert counter went to 2.

ETA: With WordFence reactivated, two more failures before success. The incidence of failures has really increased badly. And is it supposed to take minutes and minutes?

• This reply was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by Floris.
• This reply was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by Floris.

Hi @florismk,

Thank you for continuing troubleshooting this.

Just to clarify, Boost prompts you to regenerate critical CSS following any modification that could affect the appearance or functionality of your site. This includes actions like installing or activating a new theme or plugin, as well as updating or creating new posts. Therefore, it’s normal to see the counter and notification to regenerate Critical CSS increase after you enable or disable a plugin. This mechanism ensures that your site’s styling remains consistent with its current configuration.

I understand that generating critical CSS still fails occasionally, requiring multiple attempts to succeed. Our logs suggest that cross-domain errors could be contributing to these issues. To help us pinpoint and resolve the problem, please verify that the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) in your WordPress settings are identical. This helps ensure that requests are not mistakenly treated as cross-domain, which could trigger security blocks or errors.

Thank you!

I understand about why Boost prompts to regenerate. It just doesn’t make sense to increase the counter after two things happen. It’s not like I can regenerate twice ?? (Especially since one was deactivating the WordFence plugin, and the other one reactivating it.)

Checked the URLs, and they are identical. As I expected, because I am aware of multiple issues caused by differences. It mystifies me that they both exist ??

It’s happening again. This time with https://www.floriskleijne.com/. Five consecutive attempts to regenerate resulted in the same error. Please advise.

Hi @florismk,

I’m sorry to hear that the issue still occurs intermittently on your site. Let me provide some context on how Boost works and generates critical CSS. Jetpack Boost creates a hidden iframe within the WordPress admin panel to generate critical CSS. This process involves loading your site’s pages one by one in the iframe and analyzing the styles needed for the above-the-fold content. So the process uses the resources of the server where the site is hosted.

If this takes a long time or fails, it can indicate potential issues with the server, such as high load, strict timeout settings, limited resources, or network latency. I’d recommend checking with your hosting provider and asking them to look for any signs of resource limits being reached, timeouts, or blocked requests during the critical CSS generation process.

If you want to avoid similar issues potentially related to hosting, there is an option to upgrade Boost where the critical CSS generation is handled on our servers, relieving your server from these tasks.

Let me know if you can get any insights from your hosting provider.

Thanks @alinclamba! I’m going to keep track of when this occurs, and when I have a dataset, ask my hosting provider to check if they see high loads at those times.

Interesting, btw, to know how you do this. I was wondering about that.