Intermittent Loading Issues When Navigating Between Top-Level and Child Categories

We’re experiencing inconsistent page loads on our Discourse forum while navigating between top-level categories and their respective subcategory pages. Sometimes the content loads as expected, but other times it requires a manual refresh for the content to appear.

Additionally, we’ve enabled the breadcrumb component, which also fails to display on certain pages and its not inconsistent unless manually refreshed.

Our setup:

  • No multi-level category structure
  • Hosted on a Linux VPS with 16GB RAM (no evident resource bottlenecks)
  • CDN is enabled
  • we have custom theme and few plugin and components have be installed.

We’re looking for guidance on:

  • What might be causing these inconsistent load/render issues?
  • Could the CDN or any client-side caching be interfering?
  • Are there specific server/client configurations, plugins, or theme components that we should examine?
  • How can we ensure that category content and dynamic elements like breadcrumbs consistently load without requiring a refresh?

Any insights or recommended troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated.

Could be related to this: Experimental ‘lazy_loaded_categories’ feature enabled on Meta

I haven’t paid attention to the development of that feature, but this sounds like it might be related.