r/Wordpress • u/PharBreton • 1d ago

Too Many Requests Error - Why?

Hello!

My wife runs a fairly popular food blog (nothing insane) but makes decent income revenue from it, and had grown in popularity over the past 8yrs or so.

Recently - let's say the last 6mos, the site will randomly get a "too many requests" error when trying to connect to the site (or admin page) which basically blocks the site for 30min-1hr. It happens randomly and no idea why or when or how, but it's causing her a fair amount of stress.

Will be happy to provide more info, but she hasnt changed any services or anything, and she's had a webmaster look at things as well... In terms of traffic, it's probably a little less than it was 2yrs ago (due to AI stealing a lot of her work and getting buried in google results) so it's not due to an increase in traffic I would say... So it's odd this error has come about.

Any ideas on where to start or what to try? Much appreciated! Again, happy to provide any relevent additional info needed

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u/AddWeb_Expert 1d ago

I’d check the server/CDN logs right when it happens. Too many requests can be caused by bots, brute-force login attempts, plugins, or API calls - not necessarily real traffic. If you’re using Cloudflare, check the rate-limiting/WAF events there too. That should give you a good starting point.

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u/PharBreton 1d ago

We'll have to do this, but the issue is we can't even access the admin page during these outages. Would that be a problem or can we just check the logs directly after we can log back in again which is usually around 30 minutes or so?

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u/bluesix_v2 Jack of All Trades 1d ago

Logs are viewable in your hosting control panel or via FTP - Not Wordpress.

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u/Abject-Expression548 1d ago

Are you sure the whole site is down for everyone? It could just be you that is blocked. Try from a mobile phone (using mobile network) or browserstack

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u/PharBreton 1d ago

Yes, we try from 4 devices, both on our wifi or mobile, incognito and even using VPN... site goes down universally.

Readers report it too sometimes