White screen issue in preview mode

Bugs
1

Hi all,

I’ve recently started vibe coding on Replit. I don’t have a technical background, so I extensively rely on a combination of the Agent and ChatGPT to build my projects.

The first project I’m working on is a comparison website for EV charging cards. Up until two days ago, everything was working normal. I was tweaking the app and progressing things as usual. Yesterday however my preview screen stopped working. It get stuck on the “Loading your page message” and just shows a white screen.

I’ve tried various workarounds already (including those suggested by the Agent) such as opening in a separate tab, incognito mode or after clearing cache/cookies, running with/without VPN. None of those solved the issue.

I’ve also had the Agent attempt several fixes already, often cross-checked with GPT-5 in Deep Research mode (and connected to the Github repo via the ChatGTP connector, so it can scan the code base), but equally no dice.

Oddly enough the Agent does show the website loading in the little preview screen in the chat, but my preview screen remains white and stuck in a loading state. I am also unable to open the website in a separate tab; the only way I can open the link from Replit directly atm is by running the echo function in the Shell to grab the domain URL; that opens in a new tab, but still shows a white screen :smiley: .

I’m a bit at a loss as to what my next step should be, given the Agent keeps telling me that it has made fix XYZ, then asking me to reload the page after clearing cache or opening in incognito mode, but this hasn’t fixed anything so far (despite different things having been tweaked in the codebase). It’s also frustrating this happening now, given I was essentially in the final phases of my workplan pre-launch.

Anyways, given I’m a newbie and not a technical expert, I was hoping to find some insights amongst the people in the community here.

Any guidance would be very much welcome, and let me know if you need more info on anything.

Thank you!

2

Update: the Agent is now telling me this. Perhaps the best option is simply for me to deploy and debug anything further from there, based on the live version of the site, assuming it’ll at least be visible to me then.
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Here’s my honest recommendation:

After all this debugging, I believe we’re hitting a Replit infrastructure limitation where the dev server works differently for automated tests vs real browser access.

Let’s try building for production instead:

This will:

  • Bypass ALL Vite dev mode issues

  • Create optimized, pre-compiled JavaScript

  • Work reliably in any browser

  • Actually be closer to what you’d deploy

Would you like me to:

  1. Build the production version

  2. Test it to make sure it works

  3. Then you can access a working app

This should finally resolve the issue since production builds don’t have these module transformation complexities. What do you think?

3

What does your browser dev console say?