General Web Troubleshooting

Are you having trouble with our website? Here's a list of general purpose troubleshooting steps that you can take which might help. They're not going to fix every problem, but they're some good "first steps" to take and they might just fix your issue straight away.

Refreshing the Page

Sometimes when you load a webpage, things just don't work quite right - for too many reasons to list, a page might just simply not load correctly the first time. So the first thing to try is simply reloading the page. Forcing a complete refresh and download of a page tells your web browser to try downloading and displaying everything again.

Follow our guide to forcing your web browser to fully reload a webpage for instructions on how to do it with your web browser.

Make sure JavaScript is enabled

While all websites should aim to work as best as possible without relying on JavaScript, the fact is that most websites these days do unfortunately require JavaScript to be enabled. If you don't have JavaScript enabled then some websites won't load at all, or will only partially load, so making sure you've got it enabled in your web browser is a good place to start.

This alone might be enough to fix a website that's not loading properly or looking weird.

Make sure Cookies are enabled

The next step is to check whether cookies are enabled. You should only ever need "First-party cookies" enabled ("Third-party cookies" are only usually used by advertisers and social network trackers) - but if you need to, you can check if Third Party cookies are enabled as well.

If normal/first-party cookies aren't enabled in your browser, you can try enabling them to see if it helps. Follow our guides to enable cookies.

Clear your cache and cookies

When your web browser loads the pages that you look at, it normally stores a copy of the files it uses to show these pages on your computer/phone. This helps speed up your browsing, because if you reload the page it doesn't have to download everything again. And also, if you go to a different page on the same website it doesn't have to re-download everything to make the page work - for example, the logo and the icons are already temporarily stored on your computer so it doesn't need to waste time and data re-downloading them.

Normally this is great because it saves your browser from having to keep re-downloading common elements of the site. However if the collection of cached temporary files gets out of sync with the live website, it can cause problems. You can fix this by clearing your cache and cookies.

Make sure your web browser is up to date

If you're using a very old web browser then it might be having trouble working with modern websites. First, check if your web browser is up to date and if it isn't, follow our instructions to update your web browser.

Restart your web browser

It might sound strange that simply restarting your web browser might solve the problem you're having with a website, but web browsers occasionally do just get a bit "mixed up" - we've found that restarting them is a simple and quick way of going back to a more "fresh" state, so give it a go.

Try a different web browser

Not all web browsers are created equally - some have more features than others, and some might have bugs or limitations with certain features that prevent some websites from working properly.

If you're consistently having trouble with a website, one thing you can do is to try a different web browser and see if the website you're having trouble with works in it instead.