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Is WordPress down for you, or is everyone experiencing unresponsiveness or server downtime?
Maybe you installed a new plugin or a theme or modified a CSS or PHP file, and something went wrong in the process, and your WordPress site is not working.
Or your site is down and becomes unresponsive.
It doesn’t happen too often, but it’s never impossible not to break things in your WordPress blog.
WordPress’s content management system powers over 43% of internet websites; its developer community is talented coders who developed plugins, themes, and scripts to extend functions and performance.
Going by their level of expertise, there shouldn’t be a problem using any plugin, theme, or script on your WordPress blog. But there’s never a guarantee that everything will always be fine and good.
For example, if you installed a nulled theme or plugin, poorly coded plugins, or edited a file, and you don’t know what you’re doing, etc…your WordPress site may be down unexpectedly, and you can’t access WordPress afterward.
In this article, I will share the nine most common reasons WordPress is down and the steps you can take to troubleshoot each error.
So, let’s get started with what to do when WordPress is down.
1. Check Your Internet Connection
To begin, you need to check your internet connection. This may look unrelated, but from experience, it is the first step to take when resolving an unresponsive WordPress site.
If you are on a wifi network, check the connection or try to load other web pages on your browser. You can load your favorite social media sites or even do a Google search for a random surf.
What we are trying to do here is to be confident you have a strong internet connection. If other web pages load fast and thoroughly, check other reasons why my WordPress site is down on this list.
2. Is WordPress Down For Everyone?
Next, you need to check if WordPress is down for everyone or just you.
It may be that your core WordPress installation software is down for maintenance at the time or just a moment of glitch that has since been resolved automatically.
To be sure, use a downtime monitoring tool like Is it down right now to check if WordPress is down or up.
Also, you need to confirm if your website is down. Strangely enough, just because you can not access the site or someone reports a downtime issue does not mean your website is down.
Once again, use the server monitoring tool to check your website’s HTTPS status code. If the result shows that your website is down, you can follow the rest of the tips in this article.
However, if the test results show your website is up and running, you can ignore the rest of the article and continue your daily activities. It’s just a moment of glitch and is likely to resolve itself.
3. Check Your Web Host Server
If WordPress is up and running as expected but not your website, it may be that your web host server is the culprit.
There are several reasons why your web host server may be down:
- Maintenance – If so, you should be notified through email in advance. Your web host may be updating hardware infrastructure, security, and software, and this might cause a temporary outage of the server. And it should be back to normal within a few hours.
- Security Patch – There could be a breach in your web host server security system from cyber criminals, such as a DDoS attack; as a result, affected servers are taken down for investigation and patching. A good web hosting company will have prevention and mitigation systems against this security threat.
- Low-Quality Web Host – I have been a victim of low-quality web hosting services. The problem is that your website will be offline or down for many hours, and even the admin area will usually be unresponsive. If so, you must migrate to a better web host. If you’re receiving frequent emails from Jetpack that your website is offline, it’s time to switch to another web host.
- Server Problem – This could be a failure in the hard drive, CPU, RAM, or any other component running on the server. There could be website downtime if your web host has no backup to minimize or eliminate this issue.
- Data Center Failure – This is not common but not far-fetched either. If the data center where your website is housed loses power suddenly and there is no emergency power failure backup plan to take over, you will go offline until the power is restored.
These are some reasons your website may be down from your web host’s end. That is why it is always good to contact your host if you’re having a downtime issue with your website.
Your web host is one of the first sources to troubleshoot site server downtime or WordPress outages.
4. Check Your Domain Availability
If you allowed your domain name to expire and didn’t renew on time, or someone has access to your account details and made changes to your domain name ownership information, your website will be unavailable.
Verifying this is easy; log into your domain name registration provider and check your account information. If you notice any unrecognized information, there is a chance hackers have hijacked your domain name. You must contact support via chat, email, or social media if you cannot log in to your account.
In most cases, you must provide documents to verify your identity and domain name ownership. If you can verify your identity and ownership of the domain name, you will regain access to your domain in time.
5. Check Your Hosting Plan Limits
Another reason WordPress is down is when you exceed the hosting limit. Some web hosts will not notify you before taking your website down for resource overuse. This is common when you’re on a shared hosting server and getting significant website traffic.
Each shared hosting plan has bandwidth and storage limits, even some so-called managed WordPress hosting. If you use more server resources than your hosting plan allows, your host will take down your website.
But in an ideal scenario, your web host should have sent an email with instructions on scaling up your hosting plan. You’ll need to upgrade your plan to a more resourceful hosting package. That should resolve the issue.
But if this is not the case, you might want to look into recently installed and activated themes and plugins.
6. Theme and Plugin Compatibility Issue
If the WordPress downtime occurs right after you change to a different theme or activate a plugin, it could cause your blog downtime. Some plugins or themes are not compatible, therefore causing network issues.
And it could also be that you’ve installed a nulled plugin or theme version that is causing the problem.
You must connect to your WordPress blog via an FTP program like Filezilla to resolve this issue.
You need to enter your server account details to connect via FileZilla. Enter your account hostname, username, password, and port in the required field and click on connect.
First, locate the folder Public_html, double-click on it, locate the folder named wp_content, and double-click to open it. Locate the plugin folder and rename it so WordPress no longer sees it.
After that, reload your website and see if you can access it. If your website loads correctly, one of the plugins is the culprit.
If you remember the last plugin you installed before the issue, you can locate and disable it immediately. Rename the folder back to Plugins so WordPress can identify it.
But if you can’t remember the last plugin you installed, go to your WordPress blog and activate the plugin one after the other to find the one causing compatibility issues.
7. WordPress Configuration
You must check your configuration setting if you point nameservers to a CDN service. Double-check your A record to confirm it is pointing to the correct IP address in your CDN service provider.
This has happened to me before; I changed the name server to Cloudflare and didn’t configure it properly. The A record in Cloudflare was misconfigured, which caused the blog to be offline.
You can read this guide to learn more about resetting all files and configuring WordPress.
8. PHP Memory Limits
PHP memory limits can also cause WordPress blog downtime if you get an error message like “Allowed memory size of 33554422 bytes exhausted. This could be related to the PHP memory limit.
WordPress allocates 32MB memory limits by default, but some hosts increase this to 64 MB. Page builders like Elementor use a lot of memory to function; if you do not prepare for it, you may get the WordPress Memory Limit Exhausted Error message.
What you need to do is to increase WordPress PHP memory limits. For more information on how to do this, read this guide.
How to Protect Your Site From Downtime
There are things you can do to minimize or protect your site from future attacks and downtime issues. Some things in your control can help reduce the chance of your WordPress blog going down or offline.
Here are some tips to consider:
- Minimize the Use of Plugins – Some plugins can perform multiple tasks, so you don’t need to install separate plugins. For example, All-in-one SEO plugins provide on-page SEO, structure data markup, sitemap submission, redirection manager, internal link, robots.txt editor, open graph, local SEO, WooCommerce SEO, and more.
- Use a Trusted WordPress Theme – WordPress themes are not created equal; you must install and use themes from a trusted developer. And always make sure your theme is up to date. If your theme has not received an update for a long time, it could be a sign that the developer has abandoned the project. You need to find a more reliable and supported theme. If you need help with this, try the Astra theme.
- Test Theme and Plugin on Staging Site – Many web hosts will provide a staging environment where you can test changes or features you intend to deploy on a live website in a secure hosting environment. Staging is simply a clone of your live website for development purposes.
- Use Clean and Secure Codes – If you’re running custom scripts or codes on your website, ensure they are written with best practices in mind and are not bloated with bugs. If unsure, ask your web developer to take a second look.
Conclusion…Why is WordPress Not Working?
Following these precautions would minimize the risk of your WordPress blog going down or offline. And if it ever happens, now you know where to look and what to do to speed up the recovery process.
Still, one of the first things to consider is to check if your WordPress site is not down for maintenance or server issues.
If the issue is unrelated to your WordPress site being down for maintenance, consider contacting your web host. Your web host should be able to share more insight into what might have happened.
