Resolving issues accessing our website

Some of you may have recently had a spate of 'Forbidden' error messages when trying to access our website. It's all fixed and most people should be able to access it fine. If you can't, please follow these steps:

If you are using wifi: Turn off mobile data (if it is turned on on your device), clear your browsing history and if possible, reset your router (turn it off for 5 minutes, then on again). Then try again.

If you are using mobile data: clear browsing history, then wait for 24 hours before trying to access the site again. (if this fails the first time, please repeat it - explanation as to why is below)

[Note: Wifi is more likely to succeed due to the way it caches/remembers information.]

If you still can't access the website, please complete this form: https://forms.gle/QEVg4uszf4ToDNxS9 so that we can work to identify and resolve the issue.

The story behind it:

I know not everyone will be interested in this, but I found it fascinating (albeit frustrating) so I thought I'd share it for anyone interested. (For those not interested, the instructions above are all you need to read.)

Usually website problems are due to the website - obviously. Usually an upgrade of one plugin clashing with another. So usually they can usually be fixed within a day or so. But sometimes - very rarely - it's something external.

The first issue in May was a small selection of people having their baskets refuse to show what had been added, making shopping impossible. But steadily more people over time. But not everyone... Eventually we realised the issue was an overzealous 'privacy' settings update on all apple products - affecting more and more people as they updated their systems. It was so strict it stopped the basket talking to the rest of the site! 

So our web designer resolved it by using a single page checkout which was editable - so the 'not talking to you anymore' sulking basket is out of the picture.

Then our web designer spent several weeks sorting all the little bugs that arise over time in a website, and did some extra 'speed it all up' magic. And it sped the site up SO much - loading was almost instant. Seriously fast for a small site like ours. Brilliant!

But then...

People started getting 'forbidden' messages. "You do not have permission to access this page". Right when we were at Naidex - for the worst possible timing.

The web designer was tearing his hair out - everything was literally working perfectly on the website. And it was so inconsistent - he could access it fine. I could access it on my laptop - but not on my phone. Even the tech experts who'd created the server he uses couldn't work it out. After some investigation it seemed that the 'checking you aren't a bot' was deciding 75% of my customers were, in fact, bots. Then the most ridiculous sounding possibility dawned on us...What if the site was now too fast? So fast that the bot-checker didn't have time to complete the check and was deciding "Um...that was too quick for me to finish, so let's block them just in case". So any internet connection that wasn't super-fast was basically not being allowed to access the site.

Rather than raise a support ticket with such an absurd problem as 'my website is so fast the internet can't handle it' - which, let's face it, sounds ridiculous, he tried a call to their support team. Before long he had the 4 top tech people on the hosting company all agreeing, all flabbergasted at the issue none of them had even heard of before, and all working on solutions. 

And they did it. I'm afraid I don't understand the tech side of it well enough to understand 'how' - but they did it.

Whoop! Problem solved!....only, I still couldn't get my phone to access it. Clearing the 'cache' (browsing history) should have worked. But although that made it fine on wifi - on mobile data: FORBIDDEN.

It turns out that to speed up our internet viewing, not only do our devices 'cache' (or remember) data from sites we visit, but so do mobile data providers. So despite clearing my phone cache I still couldn't get past the 'Forbidden', because the mobile data providers had cached it so now was showing the forbidden without even attempting to connect to the actual site! And we basically can't do anything about it - just wait until the data provider clears their cache.

This is why the instructions above for mobile data are so much more annoying than the wifi ones. With wifi, just turning it off should clear the internet cache.

And there you have it. The saga of our website.

Hopefully over the next week or so you'll all be able to access it via any method you choose - and enjoy the speed and efficiency with which it now runs.