back to the article after login

Some template frameworks do component loading behavior changes where they load the framing of the site then use an HTTP call in JS to load the component view. I wonder if that's what's messing with this behavior since the browser URL is correct? See if there's a setting for that and try turning it off. Aside from that I don't know. Maybe try with default Joomla template and if it works there that should confirm it's the template doing this.

Thanks, Kyle.  I just tried this with the Cassiopeia template as you suggested, and observed the same behavior.  The correct URL was in the browser address bar after clicking the link, but the home page was displayed.  After signing in I was directed to the home page.  As I noted earlier, we do have the redirect URL parameter empty in the CB login module and the system plugin is enabled with redirect and rewrite parameters also enabled.  I'm not sure what that means, but it'd be a "nice to have" to make this work.

Do you have Joomla page caching enabled? When that issue happens try just refreshing the page to see if you're now logged in. It could just be a caching problem. If Joomla page caching isn't enabled are you using any server side caching like cloudflare?

We don't have Joomla page caching enabled, but Siteground does have a page caching system called "dynamic caching" that is enabled by default.  (If you're interested, see this article: my.siteground.com/support/kb/siteground-dynamic-caching-configuration/ ).  It can't be turned off using any user tools, but it can be purged.  Purging doesn't solve the problem, but "dynamic caching" may be the source of the issue nonetheless.  I wouldn't have thought of that as being the cause, but it may be out of our hands.

Please PM backend super user login credentials and will take a look at your configuration and frontend login to see if I can potentially find anything, but yes it's possible that page caching built into your server is the problem.

Have reviewed your install. Your site is marked offline. Joomla's offline login won't send you to the URL you were originally going to. So that's working as intended. Do you still have issues when not in offline mode? The offline login is also entirely controlled by Joomla and not CB so none of CBs settings will have any impact on it.