June 15, 2020
5min Read
Freddy M.
Came across a white screen with a “503 Service Unavailable” error message on your WordPress website? In this tutorial, we will show you how to debug and fix the 503 WordPress error.
There a number of reasons why this error could occur. We’ll go over each of the causes and provide you with solutions on how to fix the 503 Service Unavailable issue.
If you’ve encountered the HTTP 503 error after installing or updating a particular WordPress plugin, you might have found the culprit. Just delete your most recently installed plugin to solve the issue.
However, if you don’t know which plugin is causing the service unavailable error, you should diagnose the root of the problem by disabling all plugins and enabling them one by one.
You can remove your WordPress plugins through the File Manager on your hosting control panel. In this example, we’ll be using hPanel:
If the HTTP 503 error is gone, a specific might be the problem. All you have to do is identify and delete the problematic plugin from your admin dashboard by following these steps:
NOTE: If the 503 Service Unavailable error appears again after you’ve just activated a certain plugin, it’s clear that the plugin is the culprit.
Once you’ve performed all of the steps above, the error 503 Service Unavailable should disappear, and you can reaccess your website.
If your plugins are not causing the 503 Service Unavailable error, your theme might be the root problem. Especially if you got the HTTP error 503 in WordPress after installing a new theme.
To tackle this issue, switch to a default WordPress theme, such as the Twenty Nineteen, or Twenty Twenty themes
NOTE: It’s advisable to keep the default theme even after installing new themes since it acts as the fallback theme whenever your new theme fail.
Disabling your WordPress theme using File Manager is similar to deactivating your plugins.
If you don’t remember the name of the theme that you’re using, there’s another way to deactivate it. Here, we’ll be changing to the Twenty Seventeen theme:
NOTE: If the 503 WordPress error disappears after deactivating your currently used theme, try to update the theme to the latest version. Otherwise, it’s better to get a different theme.
If the 503 Service Unavailable error persists, there might be a broken custom PHP code snippet somewhere on your website. To find out if that might the problem, try debugging your site to diagnose and fix the error.
Since the HTTP 503 error often locks you out of your admin area, activate the WP_DEBUG mode from your File Manager, so you can check the error logs:
define ('WP_DEBUG', true); define ('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); define ('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false); @ini_set ('display_errors', 0);
IMPORTANT: If you’ve set a WP_DEBUG line within your wp-config.php file, activate it by changing the value from false to true.
NOTE: You can see the error logs by accessing the /public_html/error_log file from your File Manager as well.
If the methods above still yield no result, the problem could lie in your web server. You can try these three server-side methods to solve the 503 Service Unavailable error in WordPress.
WordPress Heartbeat is a built-in API that allows your site to have an autosaving post feature. This functionality consumes your server resources, but you can limit it with the Heartbeat Control WordPress plugin or disable it altogether.
To determine if WordPress Heartbeat is the cause of the 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error on your WordPress site, add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file right after the opening <?php tag:
add_action('init', 'stop_heartbeat', 1); function stop_heartbeat(){ wp_deregister_script('heartbeat'); }
Once you’ve saved your changes, refresh your website and see if the error disappears. If that didn’t fix the error, then the WordPress Heartbeat is not the root cause of the problem. Before you continue, don’t forget to remove the code from your functions.php file.
Google and other search engines crawl your site to index your content — they visit your website regularly to gather content and determine other ranking metrics.
This crawling process can take a toll on your server resources. Consequently, it may slow down your site and cause the HTTP error 503.
Fortunately, once you’ve integrated your site to the Google Search Console, you can limit the maximum crawl rate. In order to do so from the crawl rate settings page, or request Google to limit your site crawl rate.
NOTE: These changes will be in effect for three months. Additionally, if you have non-WWW and WWW versions of your site, you have to do this for both.
If you’re getting the error 503 Service Unavailable message, check your Google Analytics page. If you’re getting more traffic than usual, you’re definitely short of server resources.
However, if you don’t have the extra traffic but still see the 503 error in WordPress, your problem might be an inadequate server memory.
If this is the case, it’s time to switch to a new WordPress hosting service
503 Service Unavailable error means that your WordPress site is live, but the server cannot be reached because of a present problem. Additionally, it makes both your front end and admin dashboard inaccessible.
Depending on the server configuration, the WordPress error can be displayed differently. For example, you can see these error codes instead:
The causes of it may vary — from faulty plugins or themes, a broken custom PHP script, to server-side issues.
The 503 Service Unavailable is a common error when your front end and back end area will not show your content. This is mostly caused by faulty WordPress plugins or themes, but other reasons occur as well.
Here’s a short recap on how to detect and solve the errors 503 in the future:
Good luck and if you have any questions, drop a comment below.
November 09 2019
Well written article. It helped me to connect the error with the fix for my website. Thank you so much!
August 14 2020
Emmm a great article, thank you
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