In this article, we will cover one of the more frustrating WordPress Errors that you may encounter: 504 Gateway Timeout. It is directly connected to the functionality of your website and can cause it to go down temporarily or just be simply unreachable on your end. The important parts for this article will be structured as to understanding the issue and identifying the culprit that may have caused it. In addition, we will go through some steps that you can do yourself in order to try and troubleshoot the error: “504 Gateway Timeout”.
Understanding “504 Gateway Timeout” WordPress Error”
In most cases, this error pops up when doing something in the background like bulk updating all of your plugins or themes, making multiple changes from more than several tabs open on your machine, which could lead to it. The error in general will display that your website “took too long to respond”.
To explain the error in simpler terms, it is connected to the resources that your web server has allocated and allows a number of processes to be made at the same time. For example, every action you make on your website is done through a request that is forwarded to the server for completion. If the tasks exceed the number of requests that are set as a limit, they will get in queue until some are completed and space is made for others. If that queue passes the estimated time for completion on that server, then it will automatically “kill” or terminate the process which you are trying to make, leading to the specific 504 Gateway Timeout Error.
If the case is too many requests for a short period of time and you stop, the website should be back up pretty quick. On the other hand, if the processes are connected to plugins that work in the background automatically or themes that are heavy and not optimized in general, then the issue will not fix itself by just not doing anything.
Troubleshooting “504 Gateway Timeout” WordPress Error”
To start the process of troubleshooting, you need to trace your steps to how you got the error in the first place. If you got it while working on the background of your website, then check if you have multiple tabs open doing several different tasks and try to minimize them to one or two, in order to free up server time to complete the processes you want.
If you got it while trying to update your plugins and themes in bulk, then try to do it one by one to minimize the time that the request will take up for one at a time, then all together.
However, if the issue is connected to a slow backend and the most simple tasks like choosing to browse through the tabs or install a single plugin cause the error, then something else is eating up the server resources. In that case there are very few things you can do to troubleshoot, but you can still try and see if you can figure it out yourself. One of the more time consuming ones is to figure out if a plugin is causing the issue. To do that, you would need to disable them all and check if the speed of the website is increased and you get that error again. If you don’t, then try enabling them one by one with the same trial and error tasks you make to figure out which one is the culprit. A good tip is to check your plugins and delete the ones you do not plan to use. The recommendation for deletion instead of just disabling the plugin comes from the server resource standpoint. Even if the plugin is disabled, it can still use up some resources and thus lead to the bigger issue at hand, and that is the error.
Occasionally, but very rarely there is a slim chance that you can troubleshoot the error simply by clearing the cache on your browser or trying another one to connect to your website. That however is mostly related to connectivity issues which sometimes make the same error code. For example, if you are using a VPN (that changes your IP Address) and for some reason it does not work or the internet is not stable, there is a chance that you get a 504 Error without an actual issue on the web server itself. Try to check with a different connection or mobile hotspot to make sure that these things are not related to the error code.
If you are still having an issue with the website and are experiencing issues with the troubleshoot or in general, do not have enough time to do everything that is explained above, then you can always contact our support with 24/7 coverage and sub 30-second response on chat to check and fix it for you. Additionally, we have a dedicated Security and Optimization Team which can take a look at your website in-depth and not only determine the cause of the issue but even optimize for better performance.