Hi Peter,
My site has been reporting errors (timeouts) which have become more regular the past week or so. I am having it looked at but nothing conclusive atm. The host guy mentioned Cron Jobs (TBH I’m not even sure what that is) as being a possible suspect, and have done as much through the host (I believe including increasing the timeout parameters), but the errors keep coming – once or twice a day I would say. Would you be able to look at WP to see if anything jumps out at you? I’m asking everyone about this Peter, and coming to you also as I do not want SEO to suffer due to frequent site down statuses.
Best regards.
Thanks.
Just over the past several days Google has started seeing your site offline a number of times–which is definitely not what we want.
I’ve had a good 20 minute look through your site and there’s nothing I see that would be a smoking gun here.
I do know all about cron jobs. Every now and then WordPress will run processes to see if it needs to do anything in the background. A simple example is, say, you’ve scheduled a post to go live at a certain time. The cronjob would publish that. That’s a really simple example–there are many of them.
All perfectly normal WordPress stuff, and not usually anything that causes an issue.
One thing going against you with a lesser-quality host like yours is they don’t run cronjobs the way they’re meant to be run. So on my servers they’re a proper server process. Every minute the server checks if there’s scheduled tasks, and triggers them from the server itself. Those cheaper hosts don’t do that – they instead wait until someone loads a page on a website, which then triggers the check. So it’s not strictly server-time based – it’s when someone loads a page. What that can lead to is that when someone wants to see content on the site, that’s when it starts working on everything else too, which can mean it’s doing too many things at once and the page won’t load.
However your site doesn’t actually do a lot of processes on cronjobs anyway–so I’d be very surprised if that was to blame. And it certainly doesn’t do more now than it did, say, a month ago.
I suspect the real fault is just the usual – your host have overloaded a server with sites and it’s causing problems because you all share the same resources. With these cheaper hosts I see that more often than not.
Just a thought – I know you don’t want to pay more for hosting – and mine is more expensive. But what if I made a ‘hidden from search engines and the general public’ copy of your site on one of my machine, just so you can see how much faster and fool-proof it is? It’ll take me a couple of hours but I’m happy to do that gratis, just to show you what hosting can be like.
It will be affecting your SEO at this stage–and I know from experience your web hosting support team aren’t that fantastic.
Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO & AI Search (GEO) Expert
