Site name : helloexpat.netlify.app
Hi everyone,
After chatting with the AI bot, I feel forced to post in the forum.
I recently ran out of credits on the Free plan, which caused my site to go offline. After upgrading to the Personal plan, my site came back online and I triggered a new deployment.
However, I noticed that Chrome on iOS was displaying my site without any CSS applied. After investigation, here is what I found:
- Private/Incognito browsing worked perfectly — CSS was loading correctly
- Normal browsing on Chrome mobile was broken — no CSS seemed fetched or applied (sadly I did not check the requests responses on mobile to confirm this)
- Manually clearing the cache on Chrome mobile fixed the issue immediately
- My site does not use any service workers
My assumption is that when the site was offline, Chrome mobile received error responses when trying to load the CSS files, and cached those error responses. When the site came back online, Chrome kept serving those cached error responses instead of fetching the new files.
This is not an acceptable solution for end users — I cannot ask my clients to manually clear their browser cache or wait 24 hours.
My concerns are:
- Is this expected behavior?
- Is there a way to configure response headers on Netlify to prevent browsers from caching error responses?
- If my site goes offline again for any reason, will this problem repeat itself for all users who visited during the downtime?
Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!