wp-admin 503 error

Question

I am getting a 503 service unavailable error only on my wp-admin page and not my main site and I cannot figure out what has gone wrong!

Steps I've taken to try to fix it are:

• disabled all plugins
• changed theme by both deleting from filesystem and through DB
• rolled back to a backup from a month ago when the wp-admin page was definitely working
• there is no custom code on the site
• called my web hoster and we have not been above 20% of our resource usage for the past month

I really don't want to wipe wordpress and start again and so am hoping that others may have suggestions of what to do. Interestingly on hitting the wp-admin page it says "Verifying you are not a robot" and then sends me to a "/.lsrecap/recaptcha?redirect_to=...&reauth=1" page which has the 503 error message, could be related?

Answer 1

Are you able to run a copy of the site locally? If so, then it is likely not the codebase. If it doesn't work, at least you know it is something in the site codebase and not likely an actual server related issue.

Was the hosting company able to look at logs. This being a server error there should be something that can give some information about what is happening.

I'm not sure of your hosting setup, but can you install a clean version of WP in a different folder and then connect to the same database. You'll likely get errors on the front-end (if it even loads) but if you can access the admin, then maybe move those core WP files into the install that is broken.

There are some other thoughts I have too, but if you want to start here, that would be great information.

Answer 2

Get your web host to clear the Litespeed cache.

We had the same issue and this fixed it for us.