One missing library takes everything after it, not just the thing it belonged to
Here is a pattern worth recognizing, on any website and not only yours. The menu will not open. The gallery does not enlarge. The counter that should animate sits at zero. Three unrelated features, all dead at once.
That is almost never three problems. It is one, and it is early.
How a single error becomes a whole page
Browser scripts on a page mostly run inside one block that fires when the document is ready. Everything queued in that block runs in order. If any statement in it throws an uncaught error, the browser abandons the rest of the block. Not just that line. Everything after it.
So a design that references a plugin it never loaded does not lose that plugin's feature. It loses every feature registered after that point. The menu is dead because the slider is missing, and the two have nothing to do with each other.
The most extreme version we found was a design that never got past its own loading screen. The statement that removes the loading overlay sat immediately after a plugin that had been registered before the library it extends. The plugin threw, the overlay was never removed, and the page was a loading spinner with a complete website hidden behind it.
The dependency almost nobody sees
The shared libraries every design loads for galleries, video and layout are all plugins for one underlying library. That library has to be registered, and registered first. Thirty-two designs had no entry for it at all, which means every piece of their JavaScript had been failing from the first plugin onward.
They all register it now, and the version is chosen per design rather than picked once for everything. Older designs use code that newer versions of that library removed, so those are pinned to the older line and the rest get the current one. Ordering matters too: a couple of designs were loading a component framework before its own dependency, so its dropdowns and tooltips threw on startup.
What this means if you are choosing a design
Every design in the catalog is checked for this now, and there are audits that read each design's own code, work out which plugins it calls, subtract what is registered, and report the gap. That is the difference between finding these one reload at a time and finding them all at once.
It is part of the same effort as how a design reads your account, how a design gets into the catalog, and the render check that turned up demo copy left in from the original themes. If you want to see where a design stands before committing, you can preview any of them, or just browse the catalog.
