Happy Tuesday! It’s time for an update 🙂
This week there was some discussion about Google’s “Core 24” search update and the impact on custom domains.
What Happened: Between August 15, 2024 and September 3, 2024, Google released their “Core 24” search update. Most of this update was focused around updating their search ranking but it also included updates to how their automated systems that flag dangerous sites work. They’re still ironing out some issues and the result is more false positives than usual.
For those impacted, this looked like a scary red warning screen on your custom domain, as well as on your subdomain that points to ThriveCart, about your site being “dangerous”, or “deceptive”, or generally not safe.
The good news is Google is well aware of this and we’ve seen lots of people have their domain restored to full health by following the steps below.
In short: We have confirmed that the issue is not with ThriveCart branding being/not being present on your checkout, but related to false positives being flagged internally by Google.
How to fix it: If you or your customers are seeing a ‘dangerous’ site warning when visiting a checkout page or your course area, then the first thing you’ll want to do is check your root domain at https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search
For example, if your course area is at members.yourdomain.com and returning a ‘dangerous site’ warning, you’ll want to check yourdomain.com at Google’s Transparency Report above, you will typically find the same warning with your root domain as well.
To help resolve this, you’ll want to check your site within Google’s Search Console; https://search.google.com/ If you have not registered your website with Google’s Search Console, then we recommend completing that. This will give you access to a number of reports. If you’re running a WordPress website, Google also offers their ‘SiteKit’ plugin which allows you to easily connect to Google’s Search Console, Analytics, and more.
Once set up with Search Console, you can go to the “Security & Manual Actions” area (https://search.google.com/u/3/search-console/security-issues) and check your domain for any related issues. You can then follow the actions there to resolve.
Finally, if you don’t have an account with Google, you can submit a manual report from: https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_error/
In addition, we have a couple of bug fixes to note from the week:
**Fixed** Shipping step being skipped on the cart page: Development was able to resolve an issue where the shipping step was skipped on the cart, using the billing address as the shipping address. This happened when the product type had been set as digital and then reconfigured to physical, but a fix has been confirmed.
**Fixed** Dashboard Slowdown: Some users reported a slow loading dashboard throughout the week, sometimes resulting in 504 errors where the page did not load at all. The development team is investigating this and have put additional measures in place to limit the impact.
If you have any questions, you can always reference our help docs for guidance or reach out to support via this form and we’ll be in touch.
Have a great week ahead!
All the best,
The ThriveCart Team