How to Troubleshooting The 503 WordPress Error

The 503 WordPress Error mostly caused by PHP code error from your plugins or themes.

To troubleshoot the error, kindly try these :

**Deactivating your WordPress plugins **
You may refer to this tutorial on how to deactivating wordpress plugins : https://help.serverfreak.com/en/article/how-to-deactivate-all-plugins-when-not-able-to-access-wp-admin-xnrrxs/

Disabling your current WordPress themes
You may refer to this tutorial on how to change your current wordpress themes to Twenty Nineteen, or Twenty Twenty theme. : https://help.serverfreak.com/en/article/how-to-change-wordpress-theme-via-phpmyadmin-10j0ulh/

Enabling WP_DEBUG
Enable the WP_DEBUG mode from your File Manager, so you can check the error logs. Follow these steps to do so:

1. Go to your CPanel, and navigate to File Manager > public_html folder/your domain directory.

2. Right click and edit the wp-config.php file. Scroll down and you will see below line :
   *@link https://codex.wordpress.org/Debugging_in_WordPress */
   define( 'WP_DEBUG', false );
   /* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */
   ****
3. Change from false to true as per below image and click Save Changes.

4. Refresh your website, and it will show the error logs message. You can see the error logs by accessing the /public_html/error_log file from your File Manager as well. Now, you may solve the problem according to the instructions shown on the WordPress error message.

Fixing the server-related issues
If all the methods above still no result, the problem could be in your web server. You can try below server-side methods to solve the 503 service unavailable error in WordPress.

1. Limit Google’s Maximum Crawl Rate by loging to https://search.google.com/search-console/about?hl=en then from the Crawl Rate Setting page, request Google to limit your site crawl rate.
2. Increase Server Resources by check your Google analytics. If you’re getting more traffic than usual, you’re definitely short of server resources. It’s time to upgrade your hosting package to a higher package which have more resources allocation.

Updated on: 07/01/2023