Wistia Google Mobile Friendly Test Error Diagnosed

I figured I would do a write-up on this crawl error because I couldn’t find any other information on the web about it.

We have multiple clients that use Wistia for their video management and periodically run Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Tool to make sure our websites pass. For those that are not aware of this tool, it’s located here: https://search.google.com/search-console/mobile-friendly. We’ll go more into depth on this tool in future posts.

When running this test application against one of our clients, we kept getting a “Page Partially Loaded” error. The error was specific to the following resource: https://distillery.wistia.com/x and was referenced Type XHR.

We had no idea what type of error this was. At first we thought our wistia integration was implemented incorrectly. We spent some time updating our embed codes and making sure everything was coded correctly. That didn’t resolve the problem.

I then decided to reach out to Wista’s Support and provided them with the error information.

I will first say, they’re support is excellent. It does take a few hours to hear back from them, but once they work with you, they are fully engaged and help to resolve your issues as it pertains to Wistia.

Their response was as follows:

Wistia Support
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Hi there,

Support at Wistia here, thanks for reaching out! Excellent question, and that error should not actually cause any issues. What’s showing here is that we don’t allow Googlebot to crawl our stats servers (http://distillery.wistia.com/robots.txt); however shouldn’t have any impact on embedding/SEO.

The only potential side effect is that Google Fetch & Render may not generate a video thumbnail in the preview, but SEO will not be impacted at all. I hope this was helpful and you should be good to go, but let me know if there’s anything I can clarify!

Best,
Wistia Support

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I want to mention that The Google Mobile Friendly Test did pass. Even when a mobile test passes, it can provide some additional Page Loading Issues. This is where the Wistia error shows up.

Based on Wistia’s response, it’s important to note that if you have Wistia video’s embedded within your site, chances are good that it will reference the distillery.wistia.com resource that’s being blocked. So you will indeed have this error as well.

From my understanding, there is currently no resolution to this error from the Google Mobile Friendly Test as it relates to the embedded Wistia resource. Hope This helps anybody looking to diagnose this issue.