What triggers this issue?
This issue reports CSS files that return one of the 4xx or 5xx status codes.
Why is it important?
CSS files are plain-text files used for formatting content on web pages.
If a CSS file cannot be accessed, the content on your web page will not be rendered the way it was supposed to, damaging the user experience on your website.
How to fix it?
These CSS files could have been deleted, moved or renamed. Also, the external website hosting the file could have been unavailable during the crawl.
Replace, fix or remove links to the broken CSS files on your pages.
To get the list of pages that reference the broken internal or external CSS file, click on the number in "No. of CSS inlinks" column in this report.
Here are the most common HTTP status codes you can come across in this report:
The 404 (Not Found) HTTP status code indicates that the file could have been moved or deleted, but the link to it was not changed. To fix this issue, you can restore the CSS file with the old URL, edit the link on a page so that it points to another CSS file, or remove the link altogether if that CSS file is no longer needed.
The 403 (Forbidden) HTTP status code indicates that our crawler was not allowed to access the CSS files. Your server could have started to block requests from our crawler at some point of a crawl. This might happen due to a server or firewall configuration. You can whitelist our IP addresses and run a new crawl.
This can also happen if your CSS files are hosted on the external server which blocks our crawler.
The 429 (Too Many Requests) HTTP status codes may indicate that the crawling speed set in the crawl settings for your project is too high for the web server. Reduce the speed in the crawl settings and run a project re-crawl.
5xx (Server error) HTTP status codes indicate some server issues, and you should address your developer or hosting provider. Your server may be misconfigured, overloaded, or generally slow.
Where practically possible, host the CSS files on your website, rather than on other external domains.