Our WordPress website has two recurring symptoms. We do not yet know whether they have the same cause.
Intermittent 502 Bad Gateway (openresty)
A visitor captured this error on 3 October 2026 at approximately 21:40 JST (12:40 UTC), and we also independently observed it in logged-out Safari. It recurred on both the public homepage and WordPress admin during checks after 00:19 JST on 4 October (after 15:19 UTC on 3 October; the exact recurrence time was not recorded). A later reload succeeded without an intervening code change.
Visitors sometimes see an older page after an update
The updated files are present on the server and have been read back and checked against the local files. However, some visitors still see the previous contact page. Reloading or opening a URL with a new query parameter has shown the latest version in our checks. We cannot yet determine whether the stale content is in the browser, WordPress page cache, or another layer.
Relevant checks:
W3 Total Cache uses Disk Enhanced page caching; logged-in users are excluded.
We have purged the WordPress cache, and changed CSS assets have version parameters. The 502 has recurred, so we cannot claim the purge resolved it.
The account has shown Active with disk space, inode usage and daily hits below their limits. The resource charts we could see did not cover the incident time, so they cannot rule out a resource problem at that time.
We could not find accessible server error logs in the free hosting panel.
Could you help investigate the recurring 502, including any upstream/PHP failures around the times above? Please also advise whether any hosting-side cache or recommended W3 Total Cache configuration could explain stale pages, and what diagnostics we should collect if it happens again.
Welcome to the InfinityFree community forum! Good to have you here.
Most people answering here are volunteers. They’re often the fastest source of help. Admin (the only staff member) checks in about once a day for issues on our end.
Volunteers can’t see your account or website. Share what you actually see, like error messages and what happens when you try something. That’s more useful than your theory of what’s wrong.
AI tools often get InfinityFree wrong. If a volunteer’s advice differs from what an AI told you, please try the volunteer’s suggestion first.
Solving an issue is a joint effort. Try the suggestions you get and report back what happened.
That’s 100% WordPress cache. It matches the behavior exactly, and you already stated you are using a WordPress caching plugin with page caching.
This is what page caching does. It generates the page once, then stores it in cache and then serves that cached page to other visitors. Updates not immediately being visible is annoying, but generally worse than having to regenerate a fresh page for every visitor, which takes longer and uses up more server resources.
If you don’t think that’s worth the tradeoff, then you should get rid of the caching entirely.
This is a tougher nut to crack. We’ve seen more people reporting similar issues, but we haven’t been able to pin the cause down yet. It could be a server issue, a website issue, an account limit issue, or something else entirely. We don’t know yet.
And we don’t have logs to find out. Creating, collecting and storing logs isn’t free. And since server capacity is finite, especially on free hosting, we’d like to spend as much capacity as possible on giving you a fast and reliable website, so we generally don’t store detailed logs of website activity. The downside of that is that issues like these are hard to troubleshoot.
502 errors can be caused by many things, but your right it’s unlikely a plugin specific to your website. It would more likely be unexpected load on the server, or another server side issue.
Just something to be aware of with Elementor, it’s a very heavy plugin, and doesn’t always play nicely with the free hosting here. so you may find you some difficulty with it in the future. Just wanted to make you aware
A 502 error from multiple websites on the same account is indeed not a code issue, that sounds more likely to be a resource issue to me.
The graphs show daily usage, but in addition to the limit per day, there are also limits on how much you can use at any single time. So a temporary spike in website activity, or just some heavy code hogging all your account’s resources, could potentially trigger such errors.
