W3TC Causing 503 Error messages

Hello @emmabrown1012

I am sorry about the issue you are experiencing and I am happy to assist you with this.

Can you please share where you are getting those 503 error messages and what are the specific messages you are getting?
Some more details about this would be appreciated, and please let me know when the issue started to occur, and if you made any changes on your website/plugins that may trigger this.

Thanks!

I’ve been experiencing the errors when both browsing on the website https://ssdsafety.co.uk and whilst working in the admin dashboard.

The messages shown are Server Error 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable.

I can’t think of any changes made other than the errors started occurring when I started using W3TC and seem to have stopped when disabling it.

Thanks.

Hello @emmabrown1012

Thank you for your feedback. Looking at your website, I can see that you may have some customer rules in your nginx.conf like brotli for example.

Can you please share which rules you have in your nginx.conf besides the WP rules and try disabling the W3TC settings one by one to see which one may be causing the issue.

Thanks!

Thank you, I have asked our hosting company to provide this information and will send it over as soon as they respond.

I have reactivated W3TC and set the Pache cache, Object cache and Browser cache. No error messages so far but the page load time still seems a bit slow and the errors were happening intermittently so I’ll keep and eye on it.

Thank you.

Here are the nginx.conf rules:

# Enable Browser Caching
location ~* \.(txt|xml|js)$ {
expires 1y;
}

location ~* \.(css)$ {
expires 1y;
}

location ~*
\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav|mp4|m4v|ogg|webm|aac|eot|ttf|otf|woff|svg)$
{
expires 1y;
}

location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|webp)$ {
expires 1y;
}

# Rewrites for Yoast SEO XML Sitemap
rewrite ^/sitemap_index.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;

# Enable Gzip compression
gzip on;

# Compression level (1-9)
gzip_comp_level 5;

# Don't compress anything under 256 bytes
gzip_min_length 256;

# Compress output of these MIME-types
gzip_types
application/atom+xml
application/javascript
application/json
application/rss+xml
application/vnd.ms-fontobject
application/x-font-ttf
application/x-font-opentype
application/x-font-truetype
application/x-javascript
application/x-web-app-manifest+json
application/xhtml+xml
application/xml
font/eot
font/opentype
font/otf
image/svg+xml
image/x-icon
image/vnd.microsoft.icon
text/css
text/plain
text/javascript
text/x-component;

# Disable gzip for bad browsers
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";

location ~* \.(txt|xml|js)$ {

expires 1y;

}

location ~* \.(css)$ {

expires 1y;

}

location ~*

\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav|mp4|m4v|ogg|webm|aac|eot|ttf|otf|woff|woff2|svg)$

{

expires 1y;

}

location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|webp)$ {

expires 1y;

}

Hello @emmabrown1012

Thank you for your feedback.

So as you can see, you already have some rules that may conflict with the W3 Total Cache Browser cache settings/rules. In this case, you should keep the Browser Cache disabled, or remove those rules and let W3TC handle the browser Caching.

Thanks!