Technical Service Bulletin Week 3 - How to resolve Access Denied function actions

20 Jan 2020 | Tech Update

Helen Grimbly
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This week, Support Lead, Helen Grimbly will be looking at "Access Denied" actions.

When Sitemorse carries out an assessment of a site, the URLs linked from pages are checked to see that they work. A fetched link can sometimes return a 403 status "Access Denied". Sometimes you may find that the link when visited in your browser appears to work even though the Sitemorse report says "Access Denied".

Generally an "Access Denied" page should include an explanatory error message. If it does not, and looks like a normal successful page, then this could indicate that the server has been configured incorrectly.

Another instance where access denied may be returned is if Sitemorse is being blocked from accessing your site, in which case you may need to whitelist our IP addresses, which are listed in the Sitemorse IP addresses article.

Finally as with most types of error, sometimes "Access Denied" is returned only intermittently. Inspecting the web server logs may provide useful information.