If a Site Check scan returns an error rather than a verdict, that’s still useful data — it tells you exactly what real users in adverse conditions would see. Here are the five most common, what they mean, and what to do.
1. “Home page did not respond”
We tried https://yoursite.com, hit a connection timeout or 5xx, and stopped. Most likely:
- Site is genuinely down (check status pages, recent deploy logs)
- DNS isn’t resolving from our cloud browser region (try
dig yoursite.comfrom a different network) - Cloudflare Under Attack mode is on (turns away anything without a JS challenge)
What to do: if your site loads in your browser but Site Check can’t reach it, check the IP we hit. We publish our outbound IPs at /.well-known/contexta-crawler.json.
2. “Walk blocked: home page linked to N pages but only 1 returned content”
Your home page rendered fine but every inner-page link came back 403/429/503. Same root cause as a BLOCKED verdict — bot protection rejecting our walk. Real users on real browsers will see no problem.
What to do: allowlist ContextaSiteCheck/1.0 in your bot manager. Or use the bookmarklet path (when available). Or run the security scan only — it’s less detectable.
3. “Certificate failed verification”
Your HTTPS certificate is expired, self-signed, or has a chain problem. Browsers will show a full-screen warning when real users hit your site.
What to do: renew the cert (Let’s Encrypt is free, takes 5 minutes via Certbot or your hosting provider’s UI). Then re-run Site Check — the tls finding should turn green.
4. “Too many redirects (5+)”
We followed your initial URL through 5+ redirects without landing on a real page. Usually:
- Misconfigured
wwwvs apex redirect (round-trip) - HTTPS redirect that bounces to HTTP and back
- Auth gate that redirects unauthenticated requests in a loop
What to do: curl -IL yoursite.com from your laptop and follow the chain manually. Look for the loop.
5. “Rate limited by your CDN”
Cloudflare or similar returned 429 enough times that we backed off. Different from BLOCKED — this is rate-based, not signature-based. Often happens when our walk hits an aggressively-tuned API endpoint.
What to do: raise your CDN’s rate limit for our IP range, or accept that the test will give you a thinner picture (we’ll mark fewer pages as walked). The numbers we do return are accurate; the sample is just smaller.
When in doubt
Errors aren’t bugs in Site Check — they’re observations about your site’s behaviour under real-world adverse conditions. The error message is the diagnosis.
For specific error chains, post the full message in the Troubleshooting Community board.