My professional website, created and developed since I idealistically invested in the earliest betas of Elements has picked up seemingly intractable bugs over the years’ updates that are driving me crazy. I tried moving everything to a new host today and the bugs persist, confirming for me that it’s not the hosting config/edge rules/etc.
- Character encoding seems stuck in Western (which was the default in Elements betas). Even though it’s now all set to UTF-8 in all Elements’ settings and the body HTML in there’s still something that’s causing Western encoding to appear only once published (via Elements ftp) on desktop and mobile browsers:
- The project takes between 8 and 12 seconds to preview even the smallest changes in any browser. This is a huge issue for me as it makes even minor trouble-shooting incredibly time consuming even with a M4 Max.
- Dark mode is not working on any browser even though it’s set correctly.
- Google has, since I built the site, told me the site map is unreadable, even though I can see sitemap.xml sitting in the same directory as index.html. So I’ve lost a search ranking that took me years to build up.
I sent Elements Support the project on 2 September; I’ve subsequently emailed them three more times to ask if they can at least quickly check the project on their own machines no less than 4 times, receiving nothing more than an auto-reply directing me to the forum, which is incredibly frustrating. So here I am.
I really regret ever outlaying many £ to Elements for almost no support when I’m desperate. It’s literally ruining my business: people can’t even read my bloody name on the top of the website 
(which may also explain why I’ve disappeared from search!!)
Yet I’m here now and it’s a big and complex website that I don’t have time to rebuild elsewhere.
Perhaps someone else in the community has encountered and fixed some of these problems? Thanks in advance – you’re my last hope before I give up and reactivate my Squarespace site…