Website Is Down? What to Check First

You type your address, press enter, and nothing loads. Or you get an error page where your homepage should be. Your stomach drops, and the instinct is to start clicking everything at once.

Don't. Outages often come from a short list of causes, and you can rule them out in order. This checklist is built for the first ten minutes: confirm the problem, check the basics, think about what changed, and decide whether to restore a good copy or ask for help.

Is it down for everyone?

Before you change anything, find out whether the site is down for everyone or only for you. Your own device, browser or internet connection can fail while the site is fine.

Try these in order:

  1. Open the site in a private or incognito window. This skips saved pages and stored logins that can confuse the picture.
  2. Switch your phone off Wi-Fi and load the site on mobile data. This is the quickest way to check from another network.
  3. Ask a friend, a colleague or a customer in another location to try and tell you exactly what they see.
  4. Use a website is down or not checker. Many free ones exist: you enter your address and they try to load it from their own servers.

A checker is useful because it tests from outside your home or office. If it reports your site as reachable but you cannot load it, the problem is probably local. Restart your router, try another browser, and stop there.

If the checker and your phone both fail, the site really is down. Write down the time, and write down exactly what the screen says. A timeout, a blank white page, a certificate warning and a named error message point to different causes, and you will want those details later.

The first checks

With the outage confirmed, check the three things that fail most often and cost the least to look at.

Your domain

Is your domain name still active? An expired domain is a common and embarrassing cause, and it is easy to fix once you spot it. Search your email for renewal notices from the company where you registered the domain. Log in to that account and look at the expiry status. If the domain lapsed, renew it first and everything else can wait.

Your certificate

If the browser shows a full-page warning that the connection is not private or not secure, the site may be running but the certificate has a problem. That is a different fix from a site that will not respond at all. Our guide to SSL certificates explains what these warnings mean and what to do about them. Do not click through a warning on a site you are trying to diagnose and then assume all is well. Visitors will see the same warning and many will leave.

Notices from your provider

Check your email, including spam, for anything from your hosting provider or website platform about maintenance, billing or a suspended account. A failed payment can take a site offline, and the notice may have been sitting there for days.

If none of that explains it, the my site is down help article walks through the next steps in more detail.

What you changed recently

Sites rarely break for no reason. Ask yourself what changed since the last time the site worked, even if it seems unrelated. Three kinds of change cause most self-inflicted outages.

A plugin

Did you install, update or delete a plugin? A plugin that clashes with something else can bring down a whole page, or the whole site. If you can still reach the admin area, deactivate the plugin you touched last and reload the site. If it comes back, you found the cause. Leave that plugin off until you know why it failed.

If you use SimpleWP, you can open the WordPress admin without remembering a password, which removes one obstacle when you are stressed and cannot find your login details. If the admin itself will not load, the problem sits deeper and a restore or help request is the better path.

A theme

Did you switch themes or edit theme settings? A theme change can break the layout or produce an error page. If you can reach the admin, switch back to the theme you used before and check again.

DNS settings

DNS is the system that tells browsers where your site lives. If you or someone else edited records at your domain registrar, for example while setting up email or moving a domain, a small typo can point visitors to nowhere. Compare the current records with what they were before. If you kept a note of the old values, put them back. If you did not, ask whoever made the change what was altered. DNS edits can take a while to spread, so a fix may not show up at once. Check from your phone on mobile data rather than reloading the same tab ten times.

One habit pays off here. Before any change, write down what it was, even in a notes app. It turns a mystery into a one-step undo.

Restoring a known good copy

If you traced the problem to a recent change and undoing it did not help, or you cannot find the cause at all, go back to a copy of the site from when it worked. This is what backups are for.

SimpleWP takes automatic backups with sensible retention, and you can also take an on-demand backup before a risky change such as a big update or a redesign. Restoring is one click from those backups. To restore a backup, follow the help article, which also covers what applies to your particular setup. Read it before you promise yourself a full restore, because what is available can depend on how your site is hosted.

Choose the most recent backup from before the trouble began. If the site broke after you updated something this morning, pick last night's copy rather than one taken after the update.

Know the trade-off. A restore returns the site to how it was at that moment. Anything added after that point, such as a new post, an order or a form submission, may be lost. If you have newer content, save a copy of it first where you can, then restore.

When to restore and when to ask for help

Restore when:

  • the problem started right after a change you made;
  • undoing the change did not bring the site back;
  • you have a backup from before it broke.

Ask for help when:

  • the domain, certificate or account looks like the cause and you cannot resolve it yourself;
  • the admin will not open and you have no clear recent change to blame;
  • a restore did not fix it, or you are unsure which backup to choose.

When you do write to support, make it easy for them. Send the address, the time it stopped working, the exact message on screen, and what you changed last. A screenshot is good. A short website is down video, a screen recording of the page failing to load, is even better because it shows what you see rather than your description of it.

Telling customers

While you work on the fix, people are still trying to reach you. Say something, even if it is short. Silence reads as neglect, and an honest note reads as a business that is paying attention.

Post it where customers already look: social profiles, a Google Business Profile, an email signature or an auto-reply. Keep it plain:

Our website is currently unavailable and we are working on it. If you need to reach us in the meantime, call or email us directly. We will post here when it is back.

Say what is affected, say how to reach you, and say where you will post the update. Do not guess at a time you cannot promise, and do not blame anyone. If it takes longer than you hoped, post a second short note instead of going quiet.

Once the site is back, check the pages that matter most: the homepage, your contact form and anything people pay through. Then note down what happened and what fixed it. If you want context for how outages are measured and what the percentages sold by hosts mean, read what uptime really means.

Make the next outage a small one

The calm you need in the first ten minutes comes from preparation: recent backups, a clear record of changes, and a place to ask for help. If you are setting up a new site or rethinking the one you have, see what SimpleWP does to keep your site backed up and easy to restore. When you are ready, start the wizard and build a site you can recover quickly.

Photo: Benjamin Farren on Pexels