Strange error on my website

[daedriccarl]

Hi

Wondering if anyone could help out here please. I tried to crawl my website using screaming frog and got a 500 error warning (odd considering it worked yesterday). I tried google speed test and got the following message - PageSpeed Insights received a 500 response from the server. To analyze pages behind firewalls or that require authentication. However, it also crawled the site and gave me a score of 70/100. It showed the site thumbnail, as normal. This was updated this morning and it showed the latest one so must have crawled.

I can access the site, as can my 'people', the site is getting hits from real users in Google Analytics so must be working.

Am very puzzled how the site can be working and not be working at the same time! If possible i would rather not share the url. The site is a test of concept and is very messy looking. it is more a test to see what happens if i do x...

Many thanks

Carl

[GPainter]

did you check your robots.txt also did you try different user agents with screaming frog? also make sure your cms isnt blocking anyone.

[daedriccarl]

Chris,

Thanks for the reply. Moments after posting (and after you replied) I discovered what it was. The site uses a bit of php code from an external site for tracking purposes. Something has broken at their end instead of my wordpress site displaying an error it is causing the 500 error and blocking the bots. I will remove the code and look for an alternative solution.

Thanks all.

Carl

[GPainter]

hah always the way, glad you fixed it. Did you try Google analytics? its free!

[daedriccarl]

I like to use both GA and a secondary stats tool to double check the figures.

[JVRudnick]

Which is why we never use 'other sites' code snippets but write our own for clients....