What to Do if You Received a “Googlebot Cannot Access CSS and JS Files” Notification from Google

If you’ve been listening to our advice, you’ve been taking advantage of Google’s free tool, the Google Search Console (previously called Google Webmaster Tools). Today, Google sent out warnings to many webmasters with the subject line “Googlebot Cannot Access CSS and JS Files.” In the email, Google warned that “blocking access to these assets can result in suboptimal rankings.”

Keep reading to learn what that means, why it matters, and what actions you should take to make sure your website performs well in Google’s search engine results.

What Are CSS and JS Files?

Your website’s code contains different types of content, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JS). These types of content contain different sets of rules for how your site should look and function when someone views it.

Why Does It Matter if Google Can Access My CSS and JS Files?

In the past, Google’s bots crawled and indexed the pages on your website on a text-only basis. Now, pages are indexed based on page rendering, which takes into consideration not just text, but also images, JavaScript, and CSS files. You can read more about this update to Google’s indexing system here.

Google cares about how your pages render for a number of reasons. For example, pages that render quickly help users get to your content easier—which Google takes into consideration when they index and rank your sites.

The speed at which your page renders has become increasingly important due to more and more people using search engines and browsing websites from their mobile devices. This topic is a little too in depth for most small business owners, but there’s a great video on it here.

So why does it matter to YOUR business? When Google can’t access these files to tell how your site renders, it could harm your website’s rankings.

What Should I Do if Google Can’t Access My CSS and JS Files?

If you’ve got Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools) connected to your website, you can use the “fetch and render as Google” tool to determine what files are currently being blocked.  Repeat this process for “Mobile: Smartphone”:

Some of the files might be third party files (such as WordPress plugins). You don’t have a lot of control over whether or not these are blocked. However, your webmaster should be able to unblock the CSS and JS files that Google needs to render your site correctly. If you don’t have a webmaster, you could always contact Blue Corona. We’ve got a whole team of ‘em.