How to fix server error on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. Log in to your BigCommerce control panel and go to Server Settings > Logs (or use the Store Logs section) to view application-level errors.
2. If a recently installed app is suspect, go to Apps > My Apps, click the app, and Uninstall or Disable it to test.
3. For Stencil theme errors, use the Stencil CLI locally (stencil start) which surfaces Handlebars template errors in your terminal; fix the template, then push via stencil push.
4. For pages built with Page Builder, go to Storefront > Pages, open the affected page, and check for broken widgets — remove or reconfigure them.
5. Contact BigCommerce Support via the Help menu with the affected URL; they can pull infrastructure logs.
6. After the fix, use Google Search Console > URL Inspection > Request Indexing to prompt re-crawling.

What is server error?

An HTTP 500 (or any 5xx) response means your web server encountered an error and could not deliver the page — instead of your store content, visitors and search-engine crawlers receive an error message. Common culprits include broken app/plugin code, a crashed database connection, exhausted server memory, a misconfigured hosting environment, or a recent theme/code change that introduced a bug. Unlike a 404 ("page not found"), a 5xx error tells crawlers the page should exist but the server failed to produce it.

Google explicitly drops URLs from its index when they persistently return 5xx errors — your products, categories, and blog posts simply disappear from search results, costing you organic traffic and revenue. Even intermittent 5xx errors waste your crawl budget: Googlebot retries and eventually de-prioritises your site, slowing the indexing of new and updated pages. Shoppers who land on a broken page immediately leave, driving up bounce rates and signalling poor quality to both users and search engines. If high-revenue pages stay broken long enough, recovering their rankings can take weeks or months even after the fix.

See the complete Server error guide for every platform and the full background.