Is Your WordPress Site Constantly Going Down? Here‘s How to Fix It

Is there anything more frustrating than a WordPress site that keeps going offline? It‘s the stuff of nightmares for any site owner. Every minute your site is down is costing you visitors, leads, sales, and credibility.

If your WordPress site seems to crash more often than it stays up, you‘re not alone. A 2020 study by Jetpack of 5.8 million WordPress sites found that the average site experienced 25 minutes of downtime per month. For eCommerce sites, the average was even worse at 52 minutes per month.

While some downtime is inevitable, frequent and prolonged outages are a major problem. Gartner estimates that the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. For large enterprises, the costs can exceed $540,000 per hour!

Common Causes of WordPress Downtime

So why do WordPress sites go down so often? Some of the most common culprits include:

• Expired domain name: If you forget to renew your domain registration, your site will become inaccessible.
• Unreliable web hosting: Bargain shared hosting plans often cram too many sites onto overloaded servers.
• Traffic spikes: If your site goes viral or gets featured on a popular site, the influx of traffic can crash an underprovisioned server.
• Plugin and theme issues: Buggy, outdated or incompatible plugins and themes can spawn fatal PHP errors.
• Hacking and malware: Malicious code infections can bog down your server or even take your site offline completely.
• Botched updates: A failed WordPress core, plugin or theme update can break your site.
• Human error: Accidental file deletions, bad code or misconfigured settings can all bring your site down.

The good news is that by methodically troubleshooting each potential cause, you can usually get your site back up quickly. Let‘s walk through the steps!

Step 1: Check if the site is down for everyone

First, make sure the problem isn‘t just on your end. A misconfigured browser or flaky internet connection could be the real issue. Use a tool like Down for Everyone or Just Me to see if your site is accessible from other locations.

If you‘re regularly experiencing downtime, consider signing up for a third-party uptime monitoring service like:

• UptimeRobot
• Pingdom
• StatusCake

These tools continuously check your site from multiple locations around the world and promptly alert you of any outages.

Step 2: Verify your domain hasn‘t expired

I‘ve seen it happen far too often. In the busyness of running your site, you forget to renew your domain name. Shortly after it expires, your site goes down.

To check your domain‘s status, do a WHOIS lookup with a site like WhoIs.net or ICANN Lookup. If your domain has expired, you‘ll need to promptly renew it with your registrar.

To prevent this from happening again, I recommend:

• Enabling auto-renewal for your domains
• Paying for several years of registration upfront
• Setting a calendar reminder at least 2 weeks before expiration

Step 3: Contact your hosting provider‘s support

Unresponsive servers are the most frequent culprit for WordPress downtime. But how do you know if the problem lies with your hosting provider?

First, check your host‘s status page or social media accounts for any known issues. For example, if you‘re hosted with Bluehost, you can check the Bluehost System Status page.

If there are no reported global outages, open a support ticket with your host‘s support team. Explain the symptoms you‘re experiencing and request that they investigate. Common host-side issues that can bring down your site include:

• Hardware failures
• Network routing problems
• DDoS attacks
• Suspended accounts due to billing issues or terms of service violations

If downtime becomes a regular occurrence, consider switching to a more reliable hosting provider.

Step 4: Deactivate plugins and switch themes

If your host gives your server a clean bill of health, the problem likely lies within your WordPress site itself. Themes and plugins are often the prime suspects.

To rule out a plugin conflict:

1. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Go to the Plugins page.
3. Select all active plugins using the checkbox at the top of the list.
4. Choose "Deactivate" from the "Bulk Actions" dropdown and click "Apply".

If you can‘t access your WordPress admin due to the downtime, you can deactivate plugins via SFTP:

1. Connect to your site using an FTP client like FileZilla.
2. Navigate to the /wp-content/ directory.
3. Rename the plugins folder to plugins_deactivated.
4. Check if your site is back online.

You can use the same process to rule out a theme conflict:

1. Access your site via FTP.
2. Browse to /wp-content/themes/.
3. Rename your active theme‘s folder to theme-name_deactivated.
4. WordPress will automatically switch to a default theme like Twenty Twenty-Two.

If disabling plugins or switching themes restores your site, you‘ve found the culprit! Reactivate plugins one by one to isolate the problematic one. Consider replacing it or contacting the developer for support.

Step 5: Check your WordPress settings

Believe it or not, something as simple as a misconfigured WordPress setting can spawn persistent downtime. Some key settings to double-check include:

• WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) – Go to Settings > General and ensure your site‘s URLs are correct, especially if you recently migrated domains or switched to HTTPS.
• Permalinks – Go to Settings > Permalinks and ensure your permalink structure is set correctly. If you recently changed it, internal links could be broken.
• PHP version – Go to Tools > Site Health and check the PHP version. If you‘re running an outdated version, you may experience incompatibilities with newer plugins and themes.

Also, if you‘re seeing a specific error message like "Error Establishing a Database Connection", "504 Gateway Timeout", or "500 Internal Server Error", copy the full message and Google it verbatim. WordPress errors are so common that you‘ll likely find specific troubleshooting steps in the WordPress support forums or on sites like Stack Overflow.

Step 6: Replace WordPress core files

If you recently updated WordPress core and your site broke shortly after, you might have a corrupted installation. Luckily, you can replace the core files without affecting your site‘s content, appearance, or functionality.

To replace core files via FTP:

1. Download a fresh copy of WordPress from WordPress.org.
2. Extract the ZIP file.
3. Delete the wp-content folder from the extracted files (this is where your themes, plugins and uploads live).
4. Connect to your site via FTP.
5. Upload the remaining files and folders, overwriting the existing ones.

This ensures you have a clean copy of WordPress core, while leaving your site‘s unique files untouched.

Step 7: Scan for malware

If your site is going down frequently or for prolonged periods, it might be compromised by malware. Hackers can inject malicious code that spawns resource-intensive processes, redirects visitors, or crashes your server altogether.

Some common signs of a hacked WordPress site include:

• Unfamiliar content like links or ads appearing on your site
• Sudden drops in traffic
• Inability to log in to WordPress admin
• Unknown FTP users or files
• Warnings in Google Search Console about malware

To check your site for infections, you can use a free malware scanner like Sucuri SiteCheck or VirusTotal.

If malware is found, you‘ll need to either clean it manually or restore from a known-good backup. Again, Googling the specific payload name or infection type will yield targeted removal steps.

To prevent reinfection, I recommend:

• Updating all software (WordPress core, plugins and themes) to the latest versions
• Deleting unused plugins and themes
• Using strong passwords and enabling two-factor authentication
• Installing a firewall like Sucuri or Wordfence
• Regularly monitoring logs for suspicious activity

Step 8: Upgrade your hosting

Frequent downtime isn‘t always caused by something as dramatic as a buggy plugin or malware. Often, it comes down to insufficient server resources.

If your WordPress site has outgrown your bargain shared hosting plan, it‘s probably time for an upgrade. Some tell-tale signs include:

• Consistently high CPU and RAM usage in your hosting dashboard
• Slow page load times, even with caching and performance optimizations
• Downtime during traffic spikes
• "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" errors

If you‘re ready to upgrade, you have a few options:

• Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting – With a VPS, you have your own dedicated slice of a physical server, with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and storage allocations. Plans can be fully-managed or self-managed.
• Cloud hosting – Cloud hosting distributes your site across a network of servers, allowing you to quickly scale resources up and down as needed. It‘s a great option for sites with unpredictable traffic patterns.
• Dedicated hosting – With dedicated hosting, you lease an entire physical server for your exclusive use. It offers the most control, security and performance, but is also the most expensive.

Step 9: Consider managed WordPress hosting

For maximum WordPress performance and security without the technical hassles, consider switching to a managed WordPress host. These specialized providers offer hosting environments specifically tuned for WordPress, along with expert support and useful tools.

Some of the top managed WordPress hosts include:

While managed WordPress hosting costs more than generic shared hosting, the benefits can be well worth it for mission-critical sites:

• Better performance – With built-in caching, CDN integration, and finely-tuned server configurations, managed hosts can dramatically improve your WordPress site‘s speed and scalability.

• Tighter security – Managed hosts meticulously harden their environments against hacks and proactively monitor for threats.

• Automatic backups – Never lose data again with managed hosts‘ automatic, redundant backups.

• Expert support – Managed WordPress hosts‘ support teams deal exclusively with WordPress, so they can quickly resolve tricky issues.

• Useful tools – Many managed hosts include handy features like staging sites, automatic WordPress updates, and easy SSL setup.

Bonus Tips to Keep Your WordPress Site Running Smoothly

Beyond the major troubleshooting steps we‘ve covered, here are some more tips to minimize WordPress downtime and keep your site healthy:

• Monitor uptime religiously – Use uptime monitoring tools so you‘re alerted immediately of downtime.
• Keep software updated – Enable WordPress auto-updates or manually update WordPress core, plugins and themes at least monthly.
• Optimize your database – Delete spam comments, revisions and orphaned metadata regularly with a tool like WP-DBManager.
• Use a caching plugin – Cache plugins like WP Rocket store copies of pages to serve to visitors quickly, reducing load on your server.
• Set up a CDN – A content delivery network like Cloudflare serves your site‘s static files from a global network of edge servers, improving speed and uptime.
• Adjust PHP memory limits – Add the following line to your wp-config.php file to increase the PHP memory limit to 256 MB:
  define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT‘, ‘256M‘);

Don‘t Let Downtime Keep You Down

I know firsthand the stress and frustration of a WordPress site that keeps going offline. In my 10+ years of running an agency, I‘ve dealt with my fair share of 3 AM panicked calls about crashed sites.

While downtime is an unfortunate reality of operating a website, the good news is that it‘s largely preventable. By being proactive about performance, security and backups, you can drastically reduce downtime and keep your site humming.

Remember, the next time your WordPress site goes down, don‘t panic! Take a deep breath and methodically troubleshoot with the steps we‘ve outlined. And if you find yourself in over your head, don‘t be afraid to reach out to a WordPress expert for help.