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Website Errors: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Updated Apr 7th, 2021 at 14:17 BST

503 Service Temporarily Unavailable errors are most often caused by your site reaching its limit for simultaneous visitors (also known as "maximum concurrent connections").

However, you might also experience 503 errors if your hosting account consumes all of its available resources. You can try one of the following solutions in order to troubleshoot further:

Navigate to your cPanel and check the Resource Usage from the right-hand menu. You want to check the CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Entry Processes, Number of Processes, and I/O Usage. If these resources are at their limit or approaching their limit 503 Errors could be experienced. Navigate to your cPanel - Resource Usage and check if the website has exceeded the resources within the last 24 hours, you can check more by clicking on the Details button.

Note: If you are running a PHP based CMS such as WordPress or Joomla it is recommended to optimize the website as much as possible or try one of the following:

  • Remove unused plugins
  • Plugins like UsageDD, Plugins Garbage Collector can help you identify the most problematic culprits.
  • Use an effective caching plugin - like WP Super Cache
  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • Enable Gzip Compression - this can be done with a rule in your .htaccess file
  • Optimize Your Images - you can check the WP-SmushIt plugin
  • Optimize your WordPress database - you can try the WP-Optimize plugin
  • Minify JS and CSS files - this plugin can help you -> Autoptimize
  • Remove Query Strings From Static Resources -> you can do that with WP Super Cache
  • Review and optimize the things that are being suggested from speed/optimization test websites such as: https://gtmetrix.comhttps://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/https://tools.pingdom.com
  • Consider upgrading your package.

Note: It is also possible a server issue is the cause of the 503 errors and we recommend contacting Hosting Support so that the issue to be investigated further.