Fix GoDaddy 503 Service Unavailable Error [Guide! Sept 2023]

Are you encountering a 503 error on your GoDaddy?

It is caused by passing your limit (maybe bandwidth limit, CPU limit etc.)

Or maybe because you added a script that overloaded your server.

In simple words,

Your server is overloaded and returns 503 to inform you about it.

Recently you might have gotten a ton of traffic or run heavy processes in the background that needed more bandwidth or CPU power than the allotted amount of these resources.

So when resource usage went over the limit. GoDaddy detected and throttled.

First, it will slow down your whole website, then fully down and return a 503 error on the screen.

If a large number of actual humans had visited your site, that’s great. But be careful about the traffic because bots over the internet generate almost 50% of traffic.

So if you don’t see sufficient numbers in the traffic report, there might be a problem. It could be a DDoS attack.

The second reason is that heavy background processes can be reiterated by heavy plugins, themes, low-end server infrastructure, no proper caching system, outdated server software, rogue plugins, etc.

We have made up a complete list of reasons with solutions. You can find one and fix it.

By the way, Godaddy is infamous for not having enough resources. Their shared hosting plan starts from just 512 MB RAM.

Therefore while dynamic websites like WordPress sites start to grow, the fewest resources don’t sustain and most GoDaddy users face 503 error and 500 error.

So upgrade it or move to modern cloud hosting.

How To Fix Godaddy 503 Error

1.Fix Your Plugin Conflicts

In WordPress, plugins provide extra power, extra design and extra scalability. The plugins are made by various developers.

So the nature of coding will be different. It may not suit your current theme and start causing problems. Sometimes popular plugins occur.

Reasons are –

• Incompatible code
• Recent improper speed optimization
• Using PHP 8.1

Solutions –

I.Incompatible Code: If some plugins are not compatible, then we have to find the culprits and replace them.

But if your website is not accessible to the browser, you can follow the steps below.

• Connect FTP to your server or go to File Manager through GoDaddy cPanel.
• Head to public_html> wp-content > plugins
• Now rename the plugins folder to plugins.old
• Refresh your site. WordPress won’t find the plugins folder. It will deactivate your all activated plugins.  Hope, your website is loading.
• Now activate a single plugin and refresh the web page. Follow the process with the rest plugins.
• When your site implies a 503 error, the last activated plugin is the culprit. Replace it.

II.Recent improper speed optimization: If you’ve done speed optimization recently, It’s a higher possibility that your speed expert or you might have done something wrong with the important plugins file.

• You might have removed crucial codes from the files of plugins to fix unused CSS or JS errors.
• You might have blocked or lazily loaded jquery files. It will surely malfunction your plugins.

So it’s better to use the Perfmatters plugin to stop loading useless code files on specific pages and load them on the other pages where these are needed.

It makes it an easier job for developers. Just plug and play. But there is a big drawback, you can’t block them or even lazily load them; otherwise, it’ll stop and cause problems on your site.

So don’t touch the jQuery urls or replace the plugins with non-jquery plugins.

III.PHP 8.1: PHP 8.1 is the latest version, and it can give the best performance, security and stability.

But it’s not advisable to use it yet as many plugins and themes are not ready for it. So change your php version to 7.4.

If the problem still persists, it’s time to move to the next step.

2.Fix Your Theme Incompatibility

You have already ruled out your plugins as a cause of the 503 error. Now it’s time to check your theme.

It may be incompatible or you may have blocked some important theme files during speed optimization or using a higher number of PHP versions.

Let’s solve it one by one –

Incompatible Issue: If you still can’t access your site, the process of deactivating the theme will be different from deactivating the plugins.

Otherwise, WordPress will show errors like “the theme directory “theme name” does not exist.” or “ERROR: The theme directory is either empty or doesn’t exist. Please check your installation.”

• Now access PHPMyadmin through cPanel.
• Go to wp_options table.
• Click on the search tab, which is on top.
• Head to option_name in the value box, enter template and hit go.
• You’ll get info of the current activated theme.
• Now change it. So in the option_value box, write the name of the WordPress default theme, like twenty-twenty.

Your current theme will change. Hopefully, the problem will be gone.

3.Increase PHP Memory Limit

By default, WordPress allocates 32MB as a memory limit at GoDaddy, which is too tiny for a normal blog.

The situation worsens when you start using heavy plugins like page builders, which require a 128 MB memory limit at least and 256 MB for best performance.

Due to low php memory, PHP processes don’t get executed and the server goes down.

So we have to increase the limit. But before doing this, you should ensure sufficient RAM.

For 1 GB RAM, only 128 MB can be the memory limit.

Three Ways to Increase PHP Memory Limit

#1.Edit the wp-config.php file

• click on public_html
• download wp-config.php file.
• open it in the notepad.
• add the line before * That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’)

• and save changes.
• Now rename already existing wp-config.php file in file manager.
• Upload the edited one.

#2.Edit the PHP.ini file

If you see a PHP.ini file in the root path, you can edit it and set memory_limit=256M

#3.Edit the .htaccess file

If you can’t find the php.ini file, go through the .htaccess file and add the line.

php_value memory_limit 256M

4.Clean Your Database

Recently on a client site, row numbers of f8_postmeta were over 9 million and the size was about 1GB. Regularly, the server had to run the massive rows.

It took a massive time, consumed the whole 2GB RAM and the php memory limit went to 356M. Frequently the server didn’t respond.

I dug their SQL tables and stumbled upon f8_postmeta with enormous rows.

Meta key “-wp-smpro-smush-data” “-post_views_count” “-ekit_post_views_count” “_yoast_wpseo_content_score” “_jetpack_related_posts_cache” with huge rows but “_kksr_fingerprint_default” was the main evil.

It was created by the KK Star Rating plugin whenever visitors provided their star reviews.

Generally, f8_postmeta stores plugins data, image attachment and payment data.

Now check your SQL table via PHPMyadmin.

So if it is vast, delete it.

How to Delete Million Rows in SQL Table (PHPMYADMIN)

• take a backup of your MySql table.
• access the MySql table, search postmeta in containing the word box and choose tableprefix_postmeta, not wp-postmeta
• find the meta keys with huge rows and note them down in the notepad.
• click on SQL tab and run the command to delete the rows

DELETE FROM f8_postmeta
WHERE meta_key = ‘_kksr_fingerprint_default’

Deleting rows can change the appearance of related elements and the plugin’s working. Watch out!.

You can also use the WP-Optimize plugin to clean up your database. You can delete uninstalled plugin data.

5.Control Heartbeat

It is a great WordPress feature that saves post drafts and shows plugin notifications regularly. So you won’t lose data.

But the API function runs a process regularly in the background, which consumes resources.

Generally, it beats per 15-20s. It is a significant number for a shared hosting plan. So it can invoke the problem, follow the steps.

How to Disable Heartbeat

• access public_html
• Go to wp-content>themes>current theme>functions.php
• paste the code in the bottom.

add_action( ‘init’, ‘stop_heartbeat’, 1 );
function stop_heartbeat() {
wp_deregister_script(‘heartbeat’);

If the problem is fixed, you must optimize the function properly as we can’t stop it for a long time.

How to optimize Heartbeat

We have to alleviate the number of frequent heartbeat API requests per minute. So its impact on the server will be negligible.

• activate Perfmatters Plugin
• scroll down to Disable Heartbeat in options
• choose “Only Allow When Edition Posts/Pages” in Disable Heartbeat
• set heartbeat frequency to 60 seconds.

And don’t forget to check the auto-schedule process and cron job.

These have also significant impacts! And can be detrimental during peak traffic hours.

Try to use an auto-schedule for essential only and do the less vital task manually.

6.Keep Your Website Copy Globally

Sometimes CDN causes 503 errors. It would help if you paused it to check what is going on.

If everything is okay, you can take help from the support team of CDN.

Or, if you are using Cloudflare, change SSL to flexible SSL and clear cache.

Although you don’t use it, you should get its power and make a copy of your website in 270 cities in 100+ countries.

It will drastically cut the load on the origin server, save 60-99% bandwidth and mitigate thousands of online threats to protect the origin server & website.

Just connect it and put it on. But if you want the best result, set up the two page rules. During editing, designing or publishing any post, switch off both rules to quickly reflect changes.

7.Put Your Server Free Load With Premium Cache Plugin

Your website speed can thump up to 200-300% by installing WP Rocket because the plugin applies more than 80% of web performance good practices automatically, after just installing.

Even without touching any of its options, the loading time of your website decreases significantly. In correlation, it also cuts enormous loads on origin server.

Its intelligent preloading bots and primed caching system convert a website into a static html website.

And the World knows how much faster is a static website than a dynamic one.

This is because pages on static websites are already built and the server just needs to send them to the end user’s browser.

And the preloading bot detects and includes all changes of your WordPress website in static html files.

So change anything with a free mind and enjoy the speed of a truly static website by cutting humongous loads.

8.Optimize Plugin For Less Resource Usage

Now many plugins come with various features. We rarely use all the features.

These run in the background as these are often preactivated.

So disable the unused features.

But every plugin doesn’t allow you to deactivate their features. You can use the Perfmatters plugin to do it.

9.Remove Resource Hungry Plugins

Every beginner webmaster uses 50% heavy plugins that consume RAM and CPU highly.

As a result, the server suffers from high load and the website goes slow or down.

Now find out the heavy one.

• Install WP Hive extension to your chrome
• Visit WordPress.org/plugins
• Search your plugins
• If you see a red cross on memory usage, replace it with a lightweight alternative.

My Favorite Lightweight Plugins

• Perfmatters
• WP Rocket
• Spam Comment
• Rankmath
• Gutenberg

10.Delete Deactivated Plugins

As a beginner, we do a lot of experiments. We install many plugins and deactivate some of them after a while.

Forget to delete or want to use in future. So we don’t delete these.

But it’s really a security threat as well as resource consumers. By the time it doesn’t get updated or can be vulnerable.

So don’t keep any deactivated plugin on your WordPress website.

11.Secure Login Page

If your login page is openly accessible, it may be exploited to hack your website. During the exploitation, server resources are used heavily.

Thus hide your login page from the World. With Perfmatters, change it quickly.

12.Say No WooCommerce on Shared Hosting

A woocommerce needs at least 256 MB php_memory_limit, then how can a 512 RAM shared hosting plan sustain?

Impossible.

Don’t use Woocommerce like heavier plugins. Upgrade or go to cloud hosting.

13.Stop Bot Traffic

Almost 50% of web traffic is from bots.

You can check it in the Live Traffic Tab of Wordfence plugin.

Search its hostname on google, people already talked about it. It not only spoils resources but also convenes threats.

You can block it with Cloudflare or Wordfence

14. Don’t Host Email & Website on Same Server For Longer Run

Email marketing is an integral part of any website to grow its audience.

It increases by the time it occupies much space in the origin server and starts impacting performance more than earlier.

So it is not suitable for the long run from any aspect. Cloudways & Kinsta, like premium cloud hosting, know it well.

They offer separate hosting for web and email. You should host them differently to avoid any conflict, alleviating performance and security threats.

15.Do A Full Speed Optimization

A full-speed optimization optimizes every process of the WordPress site to use the lowest resource.

It just makes the load light up on the server. That’s why an optimized server can perform faster on low resources. You can speed up your web property with the ultimate guide.

16.GoDaddy Sucks, Leave It For Modern Cloud Hosting

Regardless of making all efforts, if the problem is still not fixed. It’s a significant indication that the problem is due to low server resources.

As I have advised you above that, 1GB RAM for a standard blog and 2 GB RAM for a production website is needed.

But with GoDaddy’s entry-level shared hosting plan, you just get 512 MB of virtual RAM.

It’s too little.

And shared hosting is known to throttle their bandwidth and disk space. So that they can sell to as many customers as possible and earn huge profit.

GoDaddy is one of them. Even they are stagnant in adopting new technology and have blocked many popular performance booster plugins like W3 Total Cache WP Super Cache.

So strange!

That’s why World famous Forbes advises to avoid GoDaddy and iTheme called them poor overcrowded host and gold miner of upselling strategies.

Recently GoDaddy faced massive attacks. 1.2 million managed WordPress hosting customer’s data was exposed. and The lazy giant couldn’t detect the big attack for 70 days.

Recent reports say the giant is facing security issues regularly. In May 2020, a data breach affected 28k customers. So unsafe.

Now, what do you expect from GoDaddy?

Choose cloud hosting and enjoy ultimate peace:)

So do you think you need to be technical? No. You are just a few clicks away from hosting your first website on the cloud.

Cloudways simplify cloud hosting for beginners.

You can host your blog at World’s best three cloud infrastructures: Google Cloud, Amazon Web Service, and, Digital Ocean with a click and enjoy World’s best performance, security and stability.

At Forbes featured Cloudways, you will get an intuitive dashboard where you can easily manage your website and get information about RAM, disk and bandwidth usage as you have done in cPanel.

Since 2019, I have been using it and powering my website amazingly.

Why Choose Cloudways

FAQ

How do I fix Error 503 on GoDaddy?
Fix plugin conflicts, increase PHP Memory and resources or move to a cloud host.

What is causing 503 error?
Low server resource, heavy plugins, page builders etc.

Please share the post on your social media accounts if your problem is fixed. I will cherish it. If not, let me know in the comment box. I will be pleased to help you.

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