Elementor Pro page randomly breaks
Hours and hours and hours of troubleshooting on this one. Tech support gives the same answers over and over even though I prove their suggestions wrong over and over. Does anyone else have a fix for this? Randomly it just won't load the Elementor layout etc. just text like this. Not Atomic. All updates done. No plugins enabled other than Elementor and Elementor Pro. No server caching. Happens on different computers, with different browsers, on different networks. This happens on multiple sites, not just this one. I have even tried moving the site to a different host, including Elementor Hosting, with the exact same issue. I can recreate reliably by clearing the Elementor Cache > Clear Files & Data, then opening the site in Incognito and clicking through the pages until it breaks. Sometimes it takes a few tries. If you refresh, it loads properly. Trying not to have a stroke.
FIXED: Claude help find the fix, so this is Claude's description of the issue and fix: Both the broken and working pages included WordPress Core's native Speculative Loading feature (<script type="speculationrules">, introduced in WP 6.8), configured to prefetch all internal links. This causes the browser to speculatively preload a page in the background as a user interacts with a link. Dropdown/submenu links require sustained hovering to reveal before they can be clicked, making them especially likely to trigger this browser-native prefetch behavior ahead of the actual click. Our working theory: the prefetched/activated page occasionally gets swapped into the visible tab before Elementor's front-end JS has finished applying widget-level styling/initialization, resulting in an unstyled page — even though every underlying network request completed successfully.
Resolution: Disabled WordPress Core's Speculative Loading feature via the officially documented filter, placed in the site's child theme functions.php:
phpadd_filter( 'wp_speculation_rules_configuration', '__return_null' );
Since applying this fix, we have been unable to reproduce the issue through our previous reproduction method (repeated navigation via dropdown menu links, Edge Incognito). We applied this fix to the other site where we could regularly recreate this issue and that site is working properly as well.