No one likes errors on websites! It can easily break visitors’ trust.

And, a common problem in WordPress websites is WooCommerce CURL error.

Unlike other errors, WooCommerce CURL error depends a lot on the hosting server settings including firewall, DNS resolution, network errors and so on.

That’s why at Bobcares we often receive requests to find the real reason for cURL errors as a part of our Server Management Services.

Let’s have a detailed look at the cURL error and discuss how our Support Engineers fix it.

Describing the cURL Error

Before diving into the fix, let’s first check on how this cURL error looks on the WooCommerce website.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that allows e-commerce on a WordPress website.

Usually, WordPress websites use the cURL library to connect and communicate with other websites. When a URL request is not completed within a specific time, it ends up in an error. A typical error on the WooCommerce website appears as:

Common reasons for the cURL error

Websites can show cURL error due to many reasons. We’ll now have a look into the top causes that our Dedicated Engineers see in WooCommerce websites.

1. Firewall setting and security modules

For security reasons, the server does not allow all incoming and outgoing connections. In such cases, where there are problems connecting to remote servers, we get a cURL error.

Similarly, security modules within the webservers block certain cURL requests on finding them suspicious. This can also cause a cURL error. For instance, Apache webserver uses the mod_security module to protect the website from malicious activity. Incorrect Mod_security rules can hinder the proper working of WooCommerce websites.

2. Network Errors

Similarly, WooCommerce sites can fail when there are problems with the network.

When a website is making a remote server request, the request may fail due to a bad network connection or even the destination server is down. In such cases, the website tries to reconnect to the remote server for a specified duration and ends up in a timeout error. This connection timeout can be yet another reason for the cURL error.

3. DNS resolution problems

Another reason that can lead to cURL error is improper DNS resolution. If the website does not resolve within a specific time after the cURL request, then it results in a cURL error.

How we fix the cURL error

So far, we have seen the various reasons that cause cURL error. Now let’s see how our Support Engineers fix the cURL error in the WooCommerce website.

Recently, one of our customers had the ‘cURL Error: Resolving timed out after XXXX milliseconds’ while using the WooCommerce website. The Support Team checked the reasons for this error.

As we know, the cURL error is a server error. So, we first checked the server log /var/log/messages to get the exact details of the error.

In this case, the firewall had blocked the outgoing cURL request. When we allowed the remote connection in the server firewall, the link started working fine.

Later we ensured that the WooCommerce website is able to connect to other websites.

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Conclusion

In short, WooCommerce cURL error: resolving timed out occur mainly due to incorrect DNS resolution, network errors, etc. We had a detailed review of each reason and we saw how our Support Engineers fixed it.