Kindly share your website URL so we can also check if the same issue is happening on our side. If there’s a turned on VPN the yes, that might be causing the issue because most VPNs block or change the page of Shopify. Try to turn off the VPN and see if it will work.
The issue is.. how many customers (many of who now have VPNs on all the time) will just leave the site and go elsewhere if it doesn’t load?
I think its the Ad and tracker blocker within NordVPN which is blocking Shopify sites.
How many will think to turn off the VPN? Probably not many. I wonder how many customers we are losing due to this?
+1 my customers recently started noticing this as well when using certain VPNs. It seems Shopify is more aggressively blocking VPNs lately? We have a headless store and call Shopify APIs directly, which are being blocked for some VPNs and leading to a broken site
I seem to have found a fix for this. By right clicking the Nord icon in my system apps stray (on windows), under ‘Advanced threat protection’ - Disabling all 3 options – Anti-malware, Advanced Virus Protection, Ad and Tracker Blocker, then refreshing the page seems to have worked. I did try disabling 1 at a time, but all needed to be disabled for the site to successfully load.
It doesn’t seem related to cookies at all btw.
For my purposes, this doesn’t really make a difference, but definitely annoying for shop-owners who’s users are not going to stop to figure this one out, or want to disable services they are paying for.
yes I think you are correct.. it is not the VPN itself but the ‘advanced threat protection’ which comes with NordVPN.
For me it seems to be either the ‘advanced virus protection’ and/or ‘ad and tracker blocker’.
( I can get it load with the ‘anti-malware’ turned on)
It is not just my website that will not load if ‘advanced browsing protection’ is enabled.
I have just tested 3 other stores using the Shopify platform and none of them will load with Nord VPN ‘advanced browsing protection’ enabled.
I have been emailing Nord but I think Shopify will have more luck getting a resolution.
It appears that NordVPN ‘advanced browsing protection’ is stopping all Shopify hosted sites from loading.
So I just came across this issue as well today, I was browsing the theme store and noticed the previews weren’t loading all of a sudden, this is when I found this post.
It also blocked me from being able to login to post this and also explains why I wasn’t able to access my tickets the other day.
The only way I could get it to load was to completely turn of Threat Protection, after trying to disable each sub option 1 at a time which didn’t work.
I can also confirm this is affecting 1 of my stores, but strangely not the other 2 (1 on dawn and 1 on super old pre 2.0 theme)
I’ve lodged a ticket with Nord about this so hopefully they look at it, based on my previous discussions with shopify over other issues I’m not going to hold my breath on them trying to do anything about it.
I’ve also lodged a ticket with Nord and they say recognise the issue.
But we’re just the little guys. It really needs Shopify itself to communicate the issue with Nord and get them to address it… or for Shopify to work out what it is that is triggering the protections… because its Nord now but probably other VPNs soon if not already.
Just spoken to VPN as I have the same issue. They came back with this.
Please create inbound and outbound rules for “Nordvpn.exe”, “nordvpn-service.exe” and “openpvn-nordvpn.exe” (the Openvpn file is located at \NordVPN\Resources\Binaries\32bit and \NordVPN\Resources\Binaries\64bit folders) on both private and public networks in your Firewall.
Yes… that will work for you.. when you access Shopify using NORD.
But not for potential customers out there in the wild who try and access your shopify store with NORD threat protection enabled.
I also lodged a ticket with them, after a bit of back and forth and advising them this was being caused by their ‘Threat Protection’ feature and nothing on the customer end, this was the last reply I got back.
Thank you for your reply.
We appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention.
We have forwarded it to our developer team, who aim to release a fix in the coming days.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this situation.
In the meantime, we suggest accessing the website without Threat Protection Pro features being enabled.
Let us know if you have any further questions.
This was on the 8th, haven’t tested again since then though.