Hi @trenton1216
Your question is actually… two questions. Hint for the future: If you need to ask several questions that aren’t really related to each other, it might be easier for fellows to respond (and for moderators to put these questions to suitable topic areas) if you make separate posts for each question.
Topic 1: 503 Errors
If the server is alive enough to respond, but for some (temporary) reason can’t handle the response right now, you may get a http 503 response. The server may be overloaded. (or the actual server handling your specific request might even be down, and you get the 503 status code from a traffic handling intermediate server.)
This may have several explanations:
- The server is simply overloaded with too many parallel requests. Perhaps a very famous person just tweeted a URL to some page on one of the hundreds (or thousands) of web sites that are located on your very server… If this is the case, then everyone would benefit from the blog being “hit” using a cache solution
- Some web site on your server might be under a denial-of-service attack, leaving only small resources to you and your other peers on the same server.
- Your WordPress installation might be too heavy. Perhaps you’ve activated statistics, additional protection, a bulletin board and lot of other stuff… In this case, it’s possible that a police function may start a timer when a request arrives, and if the WordPress stuff doesn’t respond with a page within n seconds, then the police function will send a #503 to the requester (and possibly kill the WordPress process).
To summarize: talk to your web hosting provider. They may be able to tell you more about your particular case.
Second topic: “Non scrolling site”.
This is a really tricky one.
By default, a web page is always as long as it needs to be. If everything doesn’t fit into one page length, your browser (i.e. NOT the web server) will enable vertical scrolling.
The browser will try to make the page fit into the available width on the screen. If this isn’t possible, due to tables and/or images or other elements with declared widths (or a section within PRE tags, where you forgot to hit enter…), then the virtual page will become as wide as needed, and the browser will show a horizontal scroll, too.
Responsive themes are created in such a way that some things may be organized horizontally if space allows, otherwise the blosck will be presented vertically. (In addition, a responsive theme may hide some elements if the screen is small, say replace the whole navigation menu with a single “menu” button.)
In other words, by chosing the right theme, you may minimize (but not eliminate) the probability of horizontal scrolling. But the risk of Vertical Scrolling being showed depends very much on how much content you show in each page…
(Yes, there’s one more way to turn off scrolling, but it’s NOT user friendly: Declare that all content must fit inside the available screen area and make any overflow be hidden. In this case, you site would become impossible to use for a lot of people…)
As an alternative, look into other ways of making your web site work for visitors. Read about Accessibility. (sometimes abbreviated as A11y, the number 11 in the middle indicates that 11 characters were omitted.) This way you may find out about alternative wasy to navigate a site…
