What does it mean when you reach the 508 resource limit?
The 508 Resource Limit Is Reached error occurs when your hosting account uses more resources than allocated. To fix the 508 resource limit error, first determine the root cause. Check if poorly coded plugins, high traffic, or resource-intensive backend operations trigger the issue. Optimising your website and managing resource usage effectively helps prevent this error and keeps your website running smoothly.
A resource usage spike every now and again is nothing to worry about and will cause little (if any) disruption to your account, but if you are facing constant issues then you should be looking at troubleshooting for potential issues by following the steps below.
- We find that a lot of resource usage issues are due to badly coded scripts, such as 3rd party themes or plugins that are installed on a WordPress website, if you have a WordPress website on your account that is causing the resource usage issues, we recommend disabling all plugins, and then monitoring the resource usage with those plugins disabled, you can then reactivate the plugins 1 by 1 until your find which is causing your issue.
To deactivate a plugin
- First login to your WordPress dashboard, using the format: example.com/wp-admin
- If you cannot login due to an incorrect password, you may reset it on this screen. If you do not know your login details, contact the Support team via ticket.
- From the dashboard, find ‘Plugins’ in the WordPress menu.
- Take note of the active plugins, then disable them one by one and test how your website loads after disabling each plugin.
- Some plugins are just heavy by nature, such as some shopping cart or event calendar plugins. The more visitors your site receives, the more likely the site will use more resources and slow down.
- If you need a particular plugin or theme, but it continues to cause high resource usage, we suggest reaching out to the developer of the theme or plugin to ask for assistance. If you cannot optimise the code, you may need to consider a dedicated server.
Common causes for 508 errors
- Website traffic spikes – If your site experiences high peaks in inbound or outbound traffic it can exceed allocated resources.
- Problems in code. If some pages on your site have speed issues, an increase in inbound traffic can worsen the problem. Too many concurrent page requests may push the site over its resource limits.
- Backend operations – Demanding backend operations such as imports and exports create significant load. When combined with normal traffic, they can exceed resource limits.
- Webcrawlers making a high number of requests per second. You can adjust the rate at which e.g. Google requests pages in Google Webmaster Tools.
If you require assistance, please let us know.
If this is a regular occurrence we would recommend considering an upgrade to a Virtual Dedicated Server, where no such limits are in place.