Incorrect display, need to reload the page.

Created on 18 March 2025, 21 days ago

Problem/Motivation

I am currently working on transitions of existing Drupal 7 site to Drupal 11.

I installed Drupal 11.1.4

After installation completion, I am redirected to the « Welcome page ».
Display does not correspond to the expected look and feel. See screenshot 1
Reloading the page leads to a correct display of the « Welcome page ». See screenshot 2

When navigating to admin/content, once again, display does not correspond to the expected look and feel. See screenshot 3.
Reloading the page leads to a correct display of the admin/content page. See screenshot 4

Display is not systematically wrong. What I observe is when is takes some time for the page to load, there is a chance that the display is wrong. It seems that when the loading of the page is without delay, the display is correct.

I never experienced this problem with Drupal 7, Drupal 8 nor Drupal 9.
It is with Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 installation that I have observed this problem.

Any idea of the origin of this problem ?.

Steps to reproduce

Proposed resolution

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

Introduced terminology

API changes

Data model changes

Release notes snippet

💬 Support request
Status

Active

Version

11.1 🔥

Component

other

Created by

🇫🇷France dpierre

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @dpierre
  • I can't tell from this report but I assume these are 404 errors? The browser console will show them, if you would please check there.

    If so, this is probably caused by the way CSS and JavaScript assets are concatenated has changed in recent Drupal releases. What is the web server platform configuration?

  • 🇫🇷France dpierre

    Hello,
    thanks for your quick answer.
    I opened Firefox console and browsed the web site with display problems. While I had display problems, no information was filed in the console. No error, no warning, no CSS related item; and no 440 errors.

    About web server platform configuration ?
    I do not clearly get what type of information would be interesting for further investigation.
    I use a standard web hosting service from OVH (in France). Which configuration parameters should be looked at ?

  • The web server type (Apache? nginx?) and its configuration would be helpful.

  • 🇫🇷France dpierre

    Apache.
    I have always considered it as a "blackbox service". So I have no idea about its configuration and I never tried to get into it.

  • Well I see more issues with nginx and Drupal's asset system so we can ignore nginx as a cause. I am astonished there are not 404 errors, and if there really are none, then I don't really know where to look next.

    Have you taken the step of comparing (diff-ing) the HTML output of a page with a broken layout vs the same page with a working layout? If not, that is something you could consider doing. It would provide more information.

    Are there no errors logged by Drupal?

  • 🇫🇷France dpierre

    Hello,
    thank you once again for your quick answers.
    I am not an html geek. I am not sure to rapidly see the point that leads to this situation of broken layout.

    See attachment. HTML output of the same page, one with broken layout, the other with working layout. The output with working layout was the result of reloading the page with incorrect display.

    Thansks for your help.

    PS : I have sites using Drupal 9, aside the ones with Drupal 11, on the same platform, with parallel repositories below a single /www . I never had this problem with Drupal 9 sites.

  • 🇫🇷France dpierre

    Hello,
    some more information on what I observe (using Firefox).
    Most of the time the page is displayed without delay and lhe layout is OK.
    When the page is not immediatly displayed (a 4-5 seconds delay), it finally comes with a broken layout.

    You can get access two sites which are hosted under the same /www; those are tests sites :
    - a Drupal 9.5.11 site : https://asapidev.fr/echangesd9/; I never observered display problems on this site
    - a Drupal 11.1.5 site : https://asapidev.fr/migrationtest/web/; the site on which I observe the display problems

    If necessary, I can create an account for you on these sites if it helps.

  • 🇫🇷France dpierre

    Screen shots referenced in previous comment.

  • 🇫🇷France dpierre

    I go back to your first comment :

    "If so, this is probably caused by the way CSS and JavaScript assets are concatenated has changed in recent Drupal releases."

    I have desactivated " CSS and JavaScript assets concatenation" in the "development-->performance" configuration.

    As far as I have seen while browsing intensively the site, no broken layout appeared.
    I will see in the next days if this is confirmed.

    If it is the case, it might be wise to have concatenation desactivated by default.

  • 🇫🇷France dpierre

    Hello,
    thank you very much for your support.
    It helped me in solving the problem I encountered. After having deactivated the " CSS and JavaScript assets concatenation", and several days of browsing on the site, I observed that the "broken layout" problem has disappeared.

    I read the post #3381293. It describes problems linked do "ccs and js aggregation", which might be different from what I obserserved. And some proposed solutions would lead to change things on which I have few knowledge and control.

    I still would recommend that " CSS and JavaScript assets concatenation" is not activated by default when installing Drupal. This would prevent people (like me), spending hours and days trying to figure out what was wrong in what was done when installing Drupal, and taking some of your time for helping us.

    Also, in the "developement-performance" configuration, a description of potential problems when using this option, or a link to a specific documentation would be appreciated.

  • There are consequences of not having concatenation enabled, like additional data transfer for your hosting provider and visitors.

    Some of the system module form fields have additional documentation if you enable the help module, but not these. It’s an interesting idea to improve that documentation or to enhance the inline field help text in the way you are suggesting. Consider opening an issue for that.

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