[Resolved] Page Headers blocking Google Fetch and Render

[Paul]

GP Page Headers appear to be blocking Google’s Fetch & Render in GSC.

My homepage has a fullscreen page header and the only portions of the page Google would fetch and render was the navigation and page header (with background image and content). But none of the almost 1300 words in the page content was included, nor was the content in the footer (footer widgets and footer bar). They just don’t show in the visual previews of how Google or visitors “see” the page.

Interestingly though, in the Fetching tab, the code for the entire page was visible in the Downloaded HTTP response section, so the code’s there but it seems Google just isn’t “visually” picking up the entire page in Render.

I read in another forum post that GP Hooks may by the culprit, so I disabled them in wp_head (just GA and FB pixel scripts) and ran a Fetch & Render again, with no success.

Then I decided to disable the Page Header on my homepage and ran it again. Voila! The entire page was fetched and rendered.

One page on my site that doesn’t use a Page Header at all is also fully fetched and rendered.

So, what can be done about this other than leaving my Page Headers disabled? I submitted the entire site’s sitemap to Google in GSC the other day and now it looks like I’ll need to turn off all page headers so that Google can crawl them properly.

[Paul]

Clarification Re:

Then I decided to disable the Page Header on my homepage and ran it again. Voila! The entire page was fetched and rendered.

In the Rendering tab, Googlebot shows the entire page and content. But for the ‘This is how a visitor to your website would have seen the page:’ side, only the homepage’s navigation and page header (background image and page title content) is visible in the render. The page content, nor footer is visible.

After further testing, another weird discovery, another page that use its own page header (services) can be crawled completely, even with Page Header on. So it appears that only the home page with Page Header is not being fully rendered in GSC for some reason.

[Paul]

Follow up: I noticed my homepage’s Page Header was set to ‘Merge with site header’. So I turned that off and now Googlebot fully fetches and renders the page. However, what the visitor sees is not fully rendered, only the main navigation and page header shows.

Also to note, I have .site-header set to display:none in my CSS because I do not want a site header on any of my pages. I am going to remove that from CSS and test again and report back.

[Paul]

Removing

‘.site-header {display: none;}’

from sitewide CSS didn’t improve anything. Homepage still fully renders in Googlebot, but not in what site visitors see.

[Paul]

Another observation: Googlebot and “What visitors see” both render the page fully on mobile, but still not on desktop.

I’m deactivating all caching & minification plugins now to see if that makes any difference.

[Paul]

BTW, for the mobile renders of the page mentioned above, neither the footer widgets nor the footer bar content was rendered, so Google isn’t picking up on those for some reason.

[Paul]

Disabling caching and minification plugins didn’t affect anything, so those are being turned back on now.

I crawled the site using other online crawler tools, and those all seem to pick up all page content. So I guess this is just a weird Google Search Console rendering issue.

Good news is that Google uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking purposes, so I’m good to go there.

But it’s a bit disconcerting that only one page with a Page Header isn’t being rendered for the Desktop in GSC fetch and render.

Any other ideas to try would be much appreciated.

[Tom]

I wonder if it’s just having a hard time rendering it for the test with the full height. Does removing the full screen option “fix” the issue?

[Paul]

Tom, I had that initial thought too. But the services page also uses it’s own page header set to fullscreen and that one wasn’t having any problems, so I didn’t test this theory.

Now I decided to do just that. And guess what? Both the Googlebot and the ‘What a visitor sees’ renders include all the page text as well as the footer and footer widgets. So it’s working.

Now I’ll set the home page header back to fullscreen to see if that causes the page text to be blocked in the Googlebot render again.

[Paul]

OK, so I set it back to fullscreen and both renders include all page content now.

I’ll keep an eye on this. I also have Left and Right padding set as well as Align content vertical set. If it doesn’t render properly again, I’ll try fiddling with those to see if they’re having any effect.

Thanks Tom!

[Tom]

No problem! I bet it’s just a bug with their tool.

[Author]

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