As a result, your visitors will experience a slow website. It will take a while for the page to load. But if the server is overloaded with tasks, then serving a page to a visitor becomes challenging. Normally, every time a visitor comes to your site and opens a page, your server kicks into action and serves the page to the visitor’s browser. In this type of attack, hackers send over fake traffic to your site to try and overwhelm your website. Or your website is under a certain type of hack attack called DDoS. Perhaps someone mentioned your site somewhere and therefore people are flocking to your site. The server can also throw an error if your site starts receiving way more traffic than it normally does. If your server is already up to its neck with other tasks, it’ll become overwhelmed and stop responding. When you are updating or installing plugins, themes, or core into your WordPress website, you are essentially asking your server to perform a task. Updating Or Installing A Plugin, Theme, or Core Updating or installing a plugin or theme, or even the coreġ.Let’s look at the possible reasons why your server could become overloaded: This begs a question – your site was fine so far so why can’t the server handle your activities now? Likewise, if you’ve built your site on a server that can’t handle the activities like a spike in traffic, it’ll throw an error. If the house is heavy and the land underneath marshy, your home will collapse like a deck of cards. Think of it as a plot of land on which your house is built. Long answer short: Server overload causes your website to throw the 503 Server Temporarily Unavailable Error.Ī server is where your websites are hosted. What Does 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable Mean?