Troubleshooting

Inconsistent Website Content Loading and Invalid SSL Certificates

A WordPress site I was managing had intermittent issues wherein the website would load perfectly fine for some people on the first attempt, but would not load at all for others (including myself).

For the times where the website had issues loading, we would see 1 or 2 common elements.

Problems

  1. The site would have an empty directory and no content would appear.
  2. An invalid SSL certificate warning would appear for about 5-10 seconds and then resolve to a valid certificate.

Solution

The reason these two separate issues occurred was due to having 2 A records in our DNS management panel.

The proper A record was pointing to GoDaddy shared hosting servers but the other was pointing to a HostMonster hosting server.

The website had migrated from HostMonster to GoDaddy but had not updated the A records. Instead of deleting the HostMonster IP address, it was brought to the GoDaddy account.

So for different people, the URL was resolving to one of those two IP addresses.

To fix the problem, I simply deleted the A record with the HostMonster IP address and both aforementioned issues were swiftly resolved.

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