Support » Fixing WordPress » Constant 503's

  • Hello!

    I am suddenly getting many sporadic 503 errors (server’s busy) from when visiting our website at http://www.leadingpractice.com/.

    They just come and go within minutes. This has been going on for (at least) 2 hours now. Our webhost says that there are no issues with the server.

    And we haven’t touched any plugins/content on the website for days.

    Any thoughts on this puzzle? 🙂

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  • 503’s can happen if you overload the server – either through traffic or resources, or sometimes if mod_security is being triggered (which would be something your host should resolve on their end).

    One place you could start is by optimizing your site, which could be resulting in 503’s if your gaining just enough traffic to overwhelm the server. Your site could benefit from caching and other tactics to help reduce the page size and improve the speed of resource loading.

    I ran the url through Pingdom and as you can see the page size isn’t horrible but you have a lot of resource requests that are taking an enormous time. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bnaLYx/http://www.leadingpractice.com/

    Setting up CloudFlare is a good option, and free.

    You load a lot of images, it appears to use in the sidebar Practitioners rotator. At the very least you’ll want to run them through something like SmushIt to compress their size. If you’re feeling really energetic you could also move them to a CDN or setup JetPack’s Photon plugin.

    Thread Starter bassa

    (@bassa)

    Thank you so much, Erica!

    It turns out, though, that our website was being power-spammed by bots that was trying to index our website. A server admin at our webhost fixed it all by adding a robots.txt to our root – he also added a line to our .htaccess file that forced our website to use the newest php version update.

    That helped alot! Thank you for taking your time to help out! 🙂

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