If you subscribe to the notifications of some websites, you may sometimes see a strange notification with this content: “This site has been updated in the background”. What does that mean? And if you are the website owner, how can you prevent that notification?
Troubleshooting
Useful information for debugging and errors related to web push notifications.
Chrome Push Notifications: This site has been updated in the background
What can you do if you receive that notifications? What does it mean? How can you fix it?
Web Push errors explained (with HTTP status codes)
When you send a web push notification to a browser push service, you may get an HTTP status code that represents an error.
Debugging web push notifications on a specific device
This article describes a simple and effective method for debugging web push notifications on a specific browser using Pushpad.
Web Push Error 410: the push subscription has expired or the user has unsubscribed
Subscribing users to web push notifications on your website is not enough: you also need to manage and renew their push subscriptions properly over time, otherwise you will lose subscribers.
Web push notifications not shown / not delivered to browser
Why some web push notifications are not delivered to the browser? Why some notifications are not displayed to the user?
A notification that is successfully delivered to the browser push service, may not reach the end user for various reasons:
Updating the service worker
Are you stuck with an old version of the service worker or your imported scripts are not being updated as you expect? This guide shows you how to ensure that your service worker and the imported scripts are updated in a timely manner.
Web push subscription age affects delivery rates
This article investigates one of the reasons that negatively impact delivery rates for web push. First it shows that web push subscriptions can last many years without expiring, then it proves a negative correlation between the age of a web push subscription and its expected delivery rate.
Debugging service workers and push with Firefox
If you have problems with web push or with other service worker based technologies on Firefox, then you probably want to use the Firefox developer tools for debugging.
Migrate to Pushpad from another service
If you currently use a service different from Pushpad and you want to migrate your existing web push subscribers to Pushpad you can follow these steps:
Reset browser permission for web push notifications
Many issues related to web push notifications can be solved by simply resetting the browser permission. That removes the old browser subscription and creates a new subscription.
Update the Pushpad service worker to the latest version
In the last months we have rolled out new notification features and other performance improvements.
If you use Pushpad Pro, in order to receive the update, you should make a small change to your service worker.
Inspect service workers with Chrome
If you work with the Push API or service workers in general you know that debugging can be a pain. Fortunately Chrome has two hidden gems that can save you many headaches.
Update the service worker and the scripts imported with importScripts
If you change the Javascript code of a service worker, the browser may not apply the update immediately (as we have already discussed).
In order for the update to take effect you need to:
Unable to generate ICNS file for push notification package [solved]
If you are struggling with the error above, but all your icons of the push package are of the correct size, you have probably set the wrong DPI.
Safari push notifications stop working after some time
These days we have investigated an issue related to Safari.
Sometimes it happens that you subscribe to the push notifications of a website, but after some time you don’t receive notifications anymore.
At first we thought that our system had a bug, but it’s not like that.
Service worker: importScripts never updates scripts
Pushpad is a service for web push notifications. In order to add push notifications to their websites, our customers need to install the service worker that we provide on their websites.
Initially we just asked customers to copy and paste the whole content of the service worker. However this meant that for every update we made to the script, our customers had to take action.
Then we discovered importScripts