# A litany of legacy problems – getting desperate
**URL:** https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/t/a-litany-of-legacy-problems-getting-desperate/57716
**Category:** Elements
**Tags:** elements
**Created:** [September 26, 2026, 11:09am UTC](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/t/a-litany-of-legacy-problems-getting-desperate/57716 "2026-09-26T11:09:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Adam](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/u/Adam)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2026, 11:09am UTC](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/t/a-litany-of-legacy-problems-getting-desperate/57716/1 "2026-09-26T11:09:48Z")
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…
---
### Author:  [@WeaverPixel](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/u/WeaverPixel)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2026, 11:33am UTC](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/t/a-litany-of-legacy-problems-getting-desperate/57716/2 "2026-09-26T11:33:43Z")
Hey @Adam
The support of Realmac is typically outstanding. I would guess that the one or other mail is not received as intended.
Lets ping @differentdan to look into it.
---
### Author:  [@thominator](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/u/thominator)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2026, 2:16pm UTC](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/t/a-litany-of-legacy-problems-getting-desperate/57716/3 "2026-09-26T14:16:44Z")
There may be more going on than you think. If your site is adamsebire.info, when I attempt to go there I get a security notice, meaning something isn’t hooked up right for https, and that would definitely impact your search results. It’s also unclear exactly where your problems are given your descriptions (other than the International characters bit).
The thing that makes me pause is your comment about long preview times. My first question would be are you making your own (or using others’) devpacks (as opposed to items built into Elements or on sale at the store)?
As for sitemap: “unreadable” is different than “not there.” Google is telling you that something in the sitemap is not in the form it expects. So one thing you can do is copy what’s in that file and show it here. It might give us hints about some of your problems.
Finally, just so we’re all on the same page, when you have problems it helps if you identify which macOS and Elements versions you’re using.
---
### Author:  [@differentdan](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/u/differentdan)
#### Post date: [September 26, 2026, 10:25pm UTC](https://forums.realmacsoftware.com/t/a-litany-of-legacy-problems-getting-desperate/57716/4 "2026-09-26T22:25:57Z")
Hi @Adam
1. Character Encoding - This seems fine on my end, I’ve tested both Safari and Chrome. Both are showing UTF-8, and your home page text looks to be displaying correctly. I’m not seeing what you are seeing in your attached screenshot.
Also your site title is displaying normallly in Google serps per the below:
1. Google Sitemap - Your sitemap looks fine. Are there any other messages in Google Search Console showing you why it can’t fetch the sitemap? Usually you’d see some errors or warnings that give you a hint on what might be wrong.
2. Dark Mode - This looks like it’s related to the Google Analytics tag you are placing in the global template head section. Something is causing that javascript to get malformed on preview and publish. This in turn is messing up the page source which has a top down effect of causing dark mode not to work. If I revert your global template to default, then dark mode works fine. This seems to be something we’ll need to look into, and I’ve reported that to the team.
3. Regarding the site previewing slowly, this seems to be caused by one of your custom HTML components. I deleted all of them and the site preview returned to normal speeds. Unfortunately due to the amount of custom HTML components you have created (42), I couldn’t test one by one as that would be terribly time consuming and testing custom components is beyond the scope of our support, however that would be a place to start looking. I’m wondering if all those custom components are necessary. Are they all doing something that our built-in components cannot do? And are you having AI write those custom components?