What to Do When Your Site Goes Down

Your website will not load. Your first instinct is to panic, your second is to change things frantically. Do neither. Most outages are diagnosed in minutes with a calm, ordered check, and random changes during an outage usually make things worse. Work through this article step by step before you touch anything.

Step 1: Confirm it is actually down

First, rule out a problem on your side. Try the site in a private or incognito browser window, which bypasses your cache. Try it on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off, so you are testing over mobile data instead of your office or home connection. If it loads on mobile data but not on your Wi-Fi, the problem is your connection or network, not your website. If it fails everywhere, continue.

Step 2: Read the error message

The exact error tells you where to look. A database connection error in WordPress means the site cannot reach its database; this is often temporary, but if it persists it needs support. A 500 internal server error is a generic failure, frequently caused by a recent plugin or theme change. A white screen with no message is usually a PHP error from a bad update. A domain or DNS error, such as the browser saying the site cannot be found, points at DNS or nameservers rather than the hosting itself. A certificate warning is an SSL issue, covered in Why Browsers Warn About Your Site (and How to Fix It). Write down the exact message; you will need it for the ticket.

Step 3: Think about what changed

Sites rarely break spontaneously. Ask yourself what changed recently. Did you or someone on your team update plugins, themes, or WordPress itself? Was a new plugin installed? Were DNS or nameserver settings changed? Was the domain recently transferred or renewed? If you can name the change, you have probably named the cause, and rolling it back may fix the outage immediately. If a plugin update broke the site, deactivating that plugin from the WordPress admin or via File Manager often restores it within minutes.

Step 4: Check the obvious account issues

It is worth ruling out the unglamorous causes. Log in to your client area and check that your hosting service is active and that there are no unpaid invoices suspending the account. Check that your domain has not expired. These take two minutes and resolve a surprising share of “outages.”

Step 5: Open a ticket with the right information

If the site is still down after the checks above, open a support ticket right away. Do not keep experimenting while you wait; note what you tried instead. Include these five things and your ticket will be solved far faster: your domain name, the exact error message or a screenshot, when the problem started, what changed recently, and what you already tried. See How to Open a Support Ticket That Gets Solved Fast for the full guide.

While you wait

Once the ticket is in, resist the urge to keep changing things. Every new change is a new variable that makes diagnosis harder. If the outage is on our infrastructure, our monitoring has likely already alerted us and work is underway; the ticket lets us keep you updated. If customers are asking, a brief honest holding message on your social channels beats silence: “Our website is temporarily unavailable and we are working on it.” Note your ticket number so you can reference it if you need to add information later.

Still stuck? Open a support ticket now with the five details above. For a site that is completely down, mark the urgency clearly in the subject line.