Fix: Font Awesome icons missing with Mesmerize PRO theme and MaxCDN

In this post: missing Font Awesome icons due to missing CDN configuration.

I have a WordPress blog that uses MaxCDN, W3 Total Cache, and the Mesmerize PRO theme by Extend Themes which includes Font Awesome icons.

After installing and activating the theme on my website the Font Awesome icons appeared as boxes:

Missing icon looks like a box
Another missing font awesome icon
Another missing font awesome icon

And I could see these (canceled) errors in the Network tab:

Errors in the Chrome Network tab. fontawesome-webfont status is canceled.
Errors in the Chrome Network tab. fontawesome-webfont status is canceled.

The referrer is

https://cdn1-mycompany.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/themes/mesmerize-pro/assets/font-awesome/font-awesome.min.css?ver=1.0.221

That referrer, cdn1-mycompany.netdna-ssl.com, isn’t allowed to serve this file. But there’s an easy fix: you can whitelist the CDN itself in the CDN.

The fix: whitelist the CDN itself

In MaxCDN, go to Pull Zones > Security > Whitelist.

You might already have yourdomain.com in here. What you need to add is the domain your CDN files are pulled from.

MAXCDN settings: Pull Zone tab, Security tab, whitelist tab, add cdn1-domain.netdna-ssl.com to whitelist

In my case, that was a domain that took the form of cdn1-mydomain.netdna-ssl.com, but you can find out what yours is by looking in the Network tab while you try to load your site. Look for a red-colored error message and open the Headers.

Anyway, the fix is as easy as adding the domain to this list of whitelisted domains and waiting a few minutes (for me it was about 10 minutes). Reload your website and the Font Awesome icons should now appear.

Note: You will probably need to Purge All Caches, too, once the time has passed to actually see the change in your browser (I use the dropdown in the WP toolbar).

WordPress toolbar with W3 Total Cache Performance section rolled out, Purge All Caches selected

My W3 Total Cache settings

(Just in case it’s useful to someone else trying to debug this problem)

My W3 Total Cache settings are set to upload .css, .tff, .otf, .woff, and .woff2 files.

W3 Total Cache settings for which theme files to upload by extension. css, js, gif, tff, otf, woff, woff2, etc.

Provided again as text so you can copy/paste.

wp-includes file types to upload:

*.css;*.js;*.gif;*.png;*.jpg;*.xml

Theme file types to upload:

*.css;*.js;*.gif;*.png;*.jpg;*.ico;*.tff;*.otf;*.woff;*.woff2

This is a pretty specific configuration issue but hopefully it’ll help someone else out there!