Error Message: The Page Cannot Be Displayed

Remember this famous “The page cannot be displayed” error message that shows up in Internet Explorer and also other browsers when you try to open a website? For those of you who are technical savvy and are very comfortable with computers, this article will serve as a refresher but for those who are not so good at computers, we will show you some troubleshooting steps to fix this annoying problem.

Troubleshooting steps to fix this problem

1. Check other websites – If you receive this message when trying to open just one website, try to open any other website in the browser to ensure that you are not receiving this error message when connecting to just one website. Try www.google.com or www.bloghash.com in your browser and check to see if the same error message shows up. If other websites shows up just fine, it could be a problem with just that one website you are trying to access. In this case, check the spelling of the domain and if you have put .net instead of using .com or any other domain suffix.
2. Check your Internet connection – The next step, after you know that you are unable to open any website, is to check if you are connected to the Internet. You could be using a dial-up, broadband or a proxy server to connect to Internet but you can still check to see if it’s a problem with your Internet connection. If you are connected using a dial-up or broadband, try to ping a website address and check if you receive a response. Click on Start » Select Run » Type CMD and hit enter » Type PING www.google.com (or any other popular website) in the DOS prompt and check for the response. If you receive four lines of reply, it means that your Internet connection is doing fine but if you do not, then something could be wrong with the connection itself. For users of a proxy servers, try to follow the same steps but instead of pinging google.com, ping the proxy server address and check for a response. You may also try to disconnect and re-connect your Internet connection before you proceed further. In either case, if you do not receive a response, you must speak to your service provider and proxy admin respectively.
3. Check TCP/IP – Click Start » Select Run » Type CMD and hit enter. On the command prompt, type PING 127.0.0.1 and hit enter. If you receive four lines of reply, this means that your local TCP/IP library in the operating system is working fine and we can proceed further with troubleshooting. But if you do not see four lines of reply, you may have to re-install the TCP/IP on your system.
4. Switch to OpenDNS – If you are able to unable to ping the website addresses, pinging 127.0.0.1 shows responses, you believe that you are connected to Internet and you are on a dialup or a broadband connection, you may want to try switching to OpenDNS. When you use OpenDNS, the name resolution of a website to its IP address is handled by the DNS servers of OpenDNS instead of your ISP’s and many a times it’s much faster than your ISP’s servers. After switching to OpenDNS try to open the websites and check if you are now able to access them. If still unable to, try to ping the website address in the command prompt and check the response.

The first three of the four steps mentioned above, in my experience, have resolved over 80% of incidents related to this problem. Another 10% of the issues were resolved after switching to OpenDNS and the remaining issues were resolved after either reinstalling the TCP/IP, fixing connectivity issues between computer and the ISP etc. If you are still unable to access Internet websites, please speak to your service provider for further troubleshooting.

» Suggested Reading

» Microsoft’s support page on this error message.
» tech-recipes’s page on this error message.

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