My WordPress Site Keeps Going Down

What's happening

A site that goes down once has a problem. A site that goes down every few days, or every afternoon, or every time you get busy, has a pattern, and the pattern is the clue. Each outage is usually the same cause hitting the same limit. The site comes back on its own, or after the host restarts something, and then it happens again.

The first useful question is whether it's down for everyone or just for you. Here's how to tell. If it really is going down for everyone, the timing tells you a lot: outages during busy hours point to the site running out of resources; outages at the same time each night point to a scheduled task or a backup; outages after updates point to a plugin.

Why it happens

The common causes, roughly in order:

• Hosting limits. On shared or budget hosting, the site gets a small amount of memory and processing time. A plugin that's heavy, a traffic spike, or a bot hammering the login page pushes it over the limit and the host switches it off until things calm down. The error is often a 503, a 508 "resource limit reached", or a page that just times out.
• A plugin or theme with a fault. A plugin that leaks memory or runs a slow job can bring the site down a few times a day. It usually started after that plugin was installed or updated.
• Attacks. Bots guessing passwords at the login page, or scrapers hitting thousands of pages, can overload a small site without ever getting in. Here's what a brute-force attack is.
• A failing database. Tables that have grown huge, or a database that's been corrupted, cause outages that come and go. The site may show a database connection error during each one.
• The host itself. Sometimes the server is overloaded or faulty. Your host's status page and support history will show whether other customers see the same thing.

What you can safely try

• Keep a log. Note the date, time and what the screen showed for each outage. Three entries are usually enough to see the pattern.
• Check your host's status page and your hosting account for warnings about resource limits. Many hosts show a usage graph that spikes right before each outage.
• Think back to what changed around the time it started: a new plugin, a theme update, a new feature, a traffic campaign.
• Clear your caching plugin's stored pages if you have one. It won't fix the cause, but it rules out a stale copy.
• Don't keep upgrading the hosting plan to make it stop. It's expensive and it hides the cause instead of fixing it.

When to call us

We work on business websites, and repeat outages are a standard job: we read the server's logs to find exactly what's hitting the limit, fix or replace the plugin or setting that's causing it, block abusive bots if that's the cause, and check the database. It's a flat rate you approve before any work starts. Start with our Site Down or Critical Error Fix. If you'd rather someone noticed the next outage before your customers did, every care plan includes uptime monitoring that's always on, with downtime investigated.