Random http 500 error

Hello, Eric. There’s a lot you don’t tell us here. For example, is this shared hosting, VPS, or dedicated server? What is your hosting provider’s operating system? What version of PHP, SQL, & WordPress are you running?

In cases like these I often change WP_DEBUG to ‘true’ in wp-config.php. That’s a security risk, as you’re likely aware, so please change it back when you’re done. Meanwhile, though, you might see what errors, if any, are being thrown.

If you have a VPS or dedicated server, then there are error logs in multiple locations, depending on which server you’re running. There may also be an aplet in your hosting provider’s control panel called ‘errors’ or ‘error logs’. Lastly, there may be files called error_log or error.log in your WordPress folder &/or subfolders. Check to se if they have any relevant entries.

You might also try switching to a default theme to see if the errors go away, but, because of their intermittent nature, these are always tough to troubleshoot. It’s why my hair is short & why I absolutely will not get a talking bird, as they’re entirely able to imitate to the very emphasis on each syllable exactly & correctly what I said in the thick of trying to troubleshoot these sorts of issues.

Please let us know in your next reply the answers to the questions I posed, & perhaps we can be of better assistance.

Eric, Thanks for the detailed reply. That error indicates wp-seo fell over in a screaming heap as opposed to Woocommerce. I personally don’t view it as a strictly necessary plugin, but that’s a choice each site owner needs to make.

Do you know if you can set up cron jobs in your Godaddy hosting control panel? Meanwhile, please consider reviewing your plugins & getting rid of those you don’t need. You may also wish to look at your access logs & see if there are visitors trying to hammer your site w/brute force or vulnerability scans, &, if so, to erect some security measures to stop those.

If Godaddy permits cron jobs, then we might try disabling wp-cron in WordPress & running it as a cron job via the control panel instead. This can sometimes help w/these types of problems. You may also wish to set up caching on the site if you haven’t already done so. Since you haven’t provided a site url, it’s hard to know whether that’s been done or not. That can create its own set of problems (I can’t count the number of support requests I’ve responded to where caching was implicated), but if you’ve studied the solution & configured it well, it can be very helpful.

Lastly, you may wish to check your database size & do some thorough house-cleaning, ie, revisions, unnecessary plugin tables, etc. It goes w/o saying–except it doesn’t–that you should back up your database at the start of the process & several times along the way as cleaning measures whittle it down. You never know if the next 1 will make the whole site fall over.

I hope this proves helpful.

Eric, if at all possible, please try to get that database size down. That’s surely creating strain on the site. WC transients are often a big cause of this, but revisions, plugin tables, Akismet history, spam comments, & other entries not needed to keep the site running can also contribute to make the database excessively large. So can wp-seo entries, IMO.

Do you perchance have any options using Godaddy to use Nginx as opposed to an Apache server (I assume you’re using Linux, you didn’t really say, & you strike me as one who knows well what you do when you assume :)). But Nginx, when configured properly, can really cut down on memory usage.

In terms of the cron job, what I do is add an entry to wp-config.php per the following:
define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);
& then I set it to run every 30-60 minutes in a control panel cron job. This prevents a lot of unnecessary reiterations of wp-cron. Normally I set it to run every hour unless there is a specific need to do otherwise.

Eric, sometimes that just has to be done. Congratulations on that executive decision! You can export the posts & stuff if you’d like, but I think you made the correct choice.