Troubleshoot ‘Checking Your Browser before Accessing’ Stuck

Several people get this error that states ‘Checking your browser before accessing [site name]‘ while browsing a specific website. The web page gets stuck at that point and keeps refreshing after every 5 seconds to display this same message to the user over and over again.

This has been reported to happen when users visit websites that have Cloudflare protection enabled. Cloudflare protection is a Web Security Protocol that allows users to prove their identity anonymously on the website so that the website hackers cannot launch any distributed Denial-Of-Service attack (DDoS).

What is DDOS?

A distributed denial-of-Service attack is when a hacker tries to overwhelm the web server by sending a large number of requests to the server with the intent to disrupt the normal traffic of the targeted server. As a result, the Webserver becomes temporarily or permanently unavailable to legitimate users.

Cloudflare protocol is used to secure the website against these attacks although this protocol sometimes does now work properly if the user has any Add-Ons installed on their browser. Please go through the below methods to fix this issue.

Check The Date/Time Zone On Your Computer

There are many software and services that depend on date and time to provide the user access to the resources. If the Date and Time set on your machine is too far away from your actual Time Zone, then these Web services reject the user access and this has been reported to be the case with Cloudfare protection protocol as well. You can simply synchronize your Computer clock with your Time Zone to fix this issue.

1. Click on the Windows Menu and go to Settings.
   

   

2. Next, click on the Time & Language option.

   

3. In the Date & Time section, make sure you have the correct Time Zone Selected and that the option Set Time automatically is turned on.

   

4. Apply these settings and now refresh your browser and see if that works.

Disable any Privacy Protection Add-Ons

Nowadays, using Add-Ons on the Web Browsers is common among the majority of users since most of them are free and provide helpful services or customization options for the Web. Although, when it comes to the security of Add-Ons, the configuration becomes tricky since they can interfere with other security services running in the background. You can start by disabling the security Add-Ons installed on the browser and then turn them on one by one to see which one was causing the issue.

1. Open your browser and go to the Main menu and click Add-Ons (if you are using chrome it is called extensions).

   

2. Disable all the add-ons one by one and refresh the Webpage, if you are able to access the web page.

   

3. If you have an anti-virus extension you might need to disable that as well.