How to Fix “503 Service Unavailable” in WordPress

There is a limit on the number of server resources each website can use. If this is exceeded, you will get a 503 Service Unavailable error. However, what is causing the your resources to exceed their limits is hard to identify and you will need to complete some detective work.

The problem is that the error could be caused by a plugin, theme or custom code.

Or it could be caused by heavy traffic, server glitches or a DDoS attack. If this is the case however, after a few minutes/hours, the problem will resolve itself.

If that isn’t the case, then you need to find and fix the problem.

The first step is to disable all plugins and switch themes. To do this you need to go to the plugins file in your WordPress files, using an FTP client and then change the name of the plugins file to ‘plugins_disable’. Then immediately rename the file to ‘plugins’ again.

This will disable all the plugins. Check your website now. It should display, but it will not have many of the features.

You can do the same with the themes.

If you notice your website is back on and displaying, it is a plugin/theme causing a problem. You can switch them on, one at a time, to find out which one is causing the problem. You can do this in the dashboard.

Your hosting company might be able to help you identify what is causing the issue. Therefore, contact your support team. They might point out that you have too many users trying to access your website and therefore need to use a more suitable plan. Or they might identify that some code is wrong on your site.

The last resort is to re-install WordPress and start again. This is a bad thing to do, but some people have found this to be the only way to resolve the issue.

However, before you go to this drastic action, see if you can speak to a website developer and ask if they can see the problem. They might see something that you and the hosting company have missed.