Homepage not loading with content on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager
AEM as a Cloud Service intermittently serves a blank homepage, disrupting user experience and triggering false downtime alerts. Premature caching, uninitialized services, or rendering errors often cause this issue. This article explains how to fix it by adjusting cache rules, reviewing warmup behavior, and adding health checks for custom components to ensure reliable content delivery.
Description description
Environment
This issue affects ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service - Sites, specifically in the production environment.
Issue/Symptoms
The homepage intermittently loads without content, serving an empty page. Monitoring tools generate multiple alerts indicating homepage downtime. Although the issue resolves itself within 10–20 minutes, it recurs frequently. During these periods, analysis shows discrepancies in page size, and the system serves cached versions of the empty page.
Resolution resolution
Use the following steps to resolve this issue:
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Configure proper cache invalidation rules to prevent stale or inconsistent content from being served. Include
localhostor127.0.0.1as aServerAliasin your virtual host configuration for dispatcher invalidation. For more information, refer to Understanding Dispatcher CachingÌý²¹²Ô»å Invalidated Cached Pages From AEM. -
Temporarily disable the warmup service if it sends requests before all services initialize, which can cause incomplete pages to be cached.
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Upgrade to the latest version of AEM to apply bug fixes that address issues where rendering errors result in cached null values.
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Review and update Sling Models in your codebase (for more information, refer to Create a Sling Model for the component):
- Only mark injections as optional when necessary.
- Explicitly handle null values in code to avoid runtime exceptions during initialization.
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Implement OSGi health checks for critical custom components to ensure they initialize before serving traffic:
code language-none { "hc.name": "Required Custom Components", "hc.tags": [ "systemalive", "systemready"] , "components.list": [ "com.example.core.services.impl.RenditionServiceImpl"] }Test this configuration locally by accessing
/system/console/healthcheck?tags=systemreadyand confirming that all listed components return an OK status. For more information, refer to Configuring OSGi for AEM as a Cloud Service. -
Review pod logs during startup to identify exceptions related to rendering failures or uninitialized services (e.g.,
NullPointerException). Fix these issues by ensuring proper injection and initialization of dependencies. -
Test all changes in staging environments before deploying to production to reduce the risk of downtime or caching issues.
These steps help you prevent recurring homepage outages and ensure consistent content delivery by addressing root causes such as service initialization errors and caching misconfigurations.