Top 7 Ways to Fix Google Slides Not Loading in Chrome

Google Slides is a fantastic tool to create and share captivating presentations without installing anything on your computer. While Google Slides offers an impressive range of features, your experience while using it may not always be flawless. At times, when you try to load Google Slides in Chrome, you may encounter unusual error messages that can disrupt your experience.

If you’ve already ruled out issues with your internet and restarted Chrome a few times to no avail, it’s time to look elsewhere. In this post, we’ll share some useful solutions to get Google Slides to load again in Chrome.

1. Free Up Google Drive Storage Space

Google Slides may fail to open a file and display errors like ‘Something went wrong’ or ‘Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist’ if you don’t have enough free storage space on your Google Drive.

Open the Google Drive website in Chrome, sign into your account, and check the storage status in the left pane.

Visit Google Drive

If your Google Drive storage is approaching its limit, consider emptying the trash or deleting large files to free up space quickly. Following this, Google Slides should open your files in Chrome.

2. Disable and Re-Enable the Offline Mode

The offline mode in Google Slides allows you to work on your presentations even when you don’t have an active internet connection. However, this feature can sometimes fail to work as expected, preventing Google Slides from loading your files in Chrome. You can turn the offline mode off and back on to see if that gets things moving again.

Step 1: Open Google Slides in Chrome and click the menu icon (three horizontal lines) at the top-left corner.

Visit Google Slides

Note: If Google Slides does not load at all, you can also toggle the offline mode via Google Docs or Sheets.

Step 2: Select Settings from the left pane.

Step 3: Disable the toggle next to Offline and wait for the Offline disabled message to appear. Then, turn the toggle back on.

After this, reload the Google Slides page and check if the issue is still there.

3. Try Incognito Mode

Using Google Slides in an incognito window can help you assess whether the issue is caused by one of the extensions, browser cache, or cookies. Press Ctrl + Shift + N (on Windows) or Command + Shift + N (on Mac) keyboard shortcut to open the incognito window in Google Chrome. Then, try to load Google Slides again.

If you don’t experience any issues in incognito mode, disabling extensions or clearing the browser data might help resolve the issue.

4. Disable Browser Extensions

While Chrome extensions can greatly enhance your browsing experience, they can occasionally disrupt browser processes and lead to issues. To check for this possibility, try disabling all the browser extensions temporarily.

Open Google Chrome, type chrome://extensions in the address bar at the top, and press Enter. Then, use the toggles to turn off all the extensions.

Restart Chrome after this and check if Google Slides loads fine. If this solves your problem, you can re-enable your extensions individually to identify the one causing the issue.

5. Turn Off Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration is a nifty feature in Chrome that allows the browser to use your computer’s GPU instead of the CPU to perform graphics-intensive tasks better. However, if Google Slides can load photos and videos in your presentations, you can try disabling the hardware acceleration feature in Chrome and see if that works.

Step 1: Launch Google Chrome, click the menu icon (three vertical dots) at the top-right corner, and select Settings.

Step 2: Select System from the left sidebar and disable the toggle next to ‘Use hardware acceleration when available.’

Restart Chrome after this and try to open Google Slides again.

6. Clear Hosted App Data

Hosted app data refers to the files web apps like Google Slides, Sheets, Docs, and others, store locally on your computer. If this data has become inaccessible, it could prevent Google Slides from loading in Chrome. Here’s what you can do to fix it.

Step 1: Open Google Chrome on your computer. Click the three-dot menu icon at the top-right corner, go to More tools, and select Clear browsing data.

Step 2: Under the Advanced tab, tick the ‘Hosted app data’ checkbox and clear all the other checkboxes. Then, click the Clear data button.

7. Clear Browsing Data

If Google Slides is not working properly in Chrome even after purging the hosted app data, it’s likely that the existing browsing data is corrupt. Here’s how you can get rid of the problematic browsing data.

Step 1: Open Google Chrome. Press Ctrl + Shift + Delete (on Windows) or Command + Shift + Delete keyboard shortcut to open the ‘Clear browsing data’ panel.

Step 2: Use the drop-down menu to select All time and tick the checkboxes that read ‘Cookies and other site data’ and ‘Cached images and files.’ Then, hit the Clear data button.

Slide Into Success

Although Google Slides is a reliable tool for creating presentations for free, it can occasionally leave you disappointed when it fails to load in Chrome. We hope that’s no longer the case and one of the above tips has helped you fix the underlying issue.