Pages not formatting properly

[dsafety]

I have an intermittent problem with pages on my site not formatting properly after being edited in Elementor. The problem usually fixes itself for a while but then returns. I have attached two screenshots that demonstrate the problem.

The image named "good formatting" is how the page appears when viewed in Elementor. The image named "bad formatting" is what I see when viewing the live page.

I have purged cache in both Elementor and in my browser, (Chrome). This does not seem to have any effect.

What am I doing wrong? Could this be a theme, (Blocksy),problem

Thanks in advance for your help.

Bob

 

[AI Helper]

This usually happens when the live page is loading old/minified CSS (Elementor + cache/CDN),so the layout falls back to a single column. It’s rarely Blocksy itself.

Try this sequence (take a quick backup first):

• Elementor → Tools → Regenerate CSS & Data.
• Elementor → Settings → Advanced → set CSS Print Method = External File (test; if worse, switch back).
• Purge/disable all caching layers temporarily: cache plugin, host cache, Cloudflare/CDN, and any minify/combine (Autoptimize, LiteSpeed, WP Rocket, etc.). Then hard refresh.
• Check Chrome DevTools → Network: confirm the Elementor CSS file returns 200 (not 404/403) and isn’t served from an old cache.

If you’re using a minify/combine plugin, exclude:

/wp-content/uploads/elementor/css/
/wp-content/plugins/elementor/assets/

Post your caching stack (plugin + host + CDN) and I can suggest exact exclusions.

 

[Community]

We've had to deal with this recently too, It was a page we'd copied from another site or another part of the same site. So in the end I created a new page in wordpress like "Services2" edited with Elementor and copied all the sections across to the new page.

Then deleted the old page, And renamed the slug and page back to "Services". Since then its not done it. I think sometimes if sections and pages get a bit too cluttered and overused some scripts or caching doesnt trigger a refresh properly.

 

[dsafety]

Thanks for the help. AI Helper's suggestions were a little over my head so I decided to try Community's suggestion first. It worked like a charm.

One interesting thing that I noticed during the process was the original page's name had somehow been changed with the addition of a suffix "-2". I do not recall doing this on purpose. The entire site was created by rebuilding a malware infested site in a staged environment. When the rebuild was complete, I renamed the staged version to replace the original version. Maybe the page-name was changed at that time. I plan to go through all the pages on my site to see if there are any others with "-2" in the URL. If I find any, I will make the proper repairs.

Since I have your attention, I would like to ask another question. When I replaced the original site with the staged site, most, but certainly not all, of the URLs on the new site were modified to remove "/staged" from URL and slug automatically. Unfortunately a large number of URLs, mostly images, did not get modified properly.

Since I have not yet deleted the staged site, all the links still work but the ones with "/staged" in the text do not link to the live site. Is there an easy way to find and modify all of the URLs that point to the wrong location?

 

[Community]

You should be using the inbuilt URL replacement tool in elementor, plus a plugin called Better search and replace. Be be careful with it and make sure you have backups before using both, as a mistake can break everything that is not reversable.

 

[dsafety]

For those following this thread, I have a strange development to report. Today, I went through all of the pages on my website and discovered that ten of them were not formatting properly. Most of these pages had been displaying properly a few days ago.

I tried purging cache with no positive result. Just for fun, I went to one of the pages that was having formatting problems and opened it in Elementor. I found a section of text and added one word to one of the sentences. After publishing this change, I discovered that all the pages that were having formatting problems are now displaying properly.

Any thoughts on how why I am still experiencing this problem and why one small edit on one of the 67 pages resulted in all the pages formatting properly... for now.

 

[dsafety]

As it turns out, the "fix" that I wrote about above did not last very long. I am stumped.

 

[Community]

It's without question caching or something breaking the elementor css, or both.

If you use the inspector tool in your browser, does it show a css file as a 404 ?

 

[dsafety]

You are right Community. I disabled WP Optimize and all the formatting problems went away. I have been using Cloudflare and and WP Optimize. Is there a fix for this problem or should I just delete WP Optimize and be thankful that the issue is no long present on my site?