Community Portal: Saving default.aspx in SharePoint Designer makes Search Box WP give error

Question

I want to customize the Community Portal home page (default.aspx) in SharePoint Designer on a SharePoint 2016 site. I have a site collection built off of my home page using Central Admin with the Enterprise Community Portal template. It created fine, shows a search box, but the minute I open the page in SPD and save it, if I relaunch the Community Portal in a browser, from then on, I get:

Web Part Error: Unknown server tag. Correlation ID: bc7ccd9e-9394-9039-df4b-2c1631e27512 

Is there some search configuration that needs to be entered? I went to Site Settings > Search and under Search Settings I added the Search Center URL, but that didn't resolve anything. How do I resolve this error? I have been able to duplicate this error when creating another site collection with another Community Portal template, and then simply opening the default.aspx in SharePoint Designer and clicking Save without editing anything.

The Correlation ID doesn't yield anything of value in the logs:

An unexpected error has been encountered in this Web Part.  Error: Unknown server tag., DesignText: <spsswc:SearchBoxScriptWebPart runat="server"...

And it proceeds to write out everything I see for that webpart from the page in SPD.

A look in the Event Log, under Windows Logs > Application yields:

A certificate operation took 11805.637 milliseconds and has exceeded the execution time threshold.  If this continues to occur, it may represent a configuration issue. 

This was logged under an Event 8321 error. I don't know why would it be looking for a certificate on a site that doesn't use SSL or certificates, but so I researched this some more. I found a site that gave a couple of things to resolve it:

1. Export the SP Root Authority certificate using Powershell:

   $rootCert = (Get-SPCertificateAuthority).RootCertificate

   $rootCert.Export("Cert") | Set-Content C:\SharePointRootAuthority.cer -Encoding byte

Then it tells you to import that certificate to the Trusted Root Certificates Store using an MMC console, where you add the "Certificates" snap-in for the Local Computer on the SharePoint server, navigate to the Trusted Root Certificates Store, right-click, select Import, find your file and import it to the Local Computer. That was all successful at exporting/importing, but didn't help the errors - either on the page or the Event Log.

2. Edit Group Policy.

On a Run Command line, run gpedit.msc. Under Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Public Key Policies, double-click "Certificate Path Validation Settings". Network Retrieval tab. Select "Define these policy settings". Uncheck "Automatically update certificates in the Microsoft Root Certificate Program (recommended)". Apply, OK. Close gpedit. On a Command Line, do a gpupdate /force.

This solved the Event Log error, but not the error on my page, so it seems they are unrelated. I have not been getting any other Event Log errors since then, but I still get the Search Box web part error on my page.

Answer 1

So there are 2 ways to solve this:

1. Re-create the site collection with the Community Portal template
2. Edit the page, delete the web part, add it back