My Website Is Down: What to Check First, in Order

Your website is down. Maybe a customer told you, maybe you just tried to pull it up yourself, and either way your stomach drops a little. I get that call all the time, and the first thing I tell people is to slow down for five minutes. Most sites that look dead are not gone. They are stuck on one specific problem, and a calm check in the right order finds it faster than clicking everything in a panic.

Here is the order I work through on a live session, and the same order you can follow before you call anyone.

First, is it down for everyone or just you?

This sounds obvious, but it matters more than anything else on this list. Your browser may be showing you an old cached copy, your office internet may be having a moment, or your own IP address may have been blocked by your site's security after too many login tries.

• Open a down-checker site like downforeveryoneorjustme.com and type in your address.
• Try the site on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off, so you are looking at it over cellular.
• Ask someone in a different location to pull it up.

If the site loads fine for everyone else, your website is not down. You have a local problem, and that is a much better day. If it is down for everyone, keep going down this list.

Check the hosting and the boring billing stuff

You would be surprised how many "broken" websites are really an expired credit card. Hosting companies suspend accounts for failed payments, and the site just stops. Log in to your hosting account, or check your email for notices about billing, suspension, or server problems. Many hosts also have a status page that tells you if their servers are having an outage, in which case the only fix is waiting, and knowing that saves you hours.

While you are in there, note whether anything was renewed, migrated, or changed recently. That information is gold later.

Check the domain and DNS

Your domain name is a separate thing from your hosting, and it has its own expiration date. An expired domain takes the whole site offline even though every file is sitting there fine. DNS changes can do it too. If someone "helped" with email recently and touched DNS records, your website may now be pointed at the wrong place. This is also where a lot of website repair help actually starts, because the site itself was never broken at all.

Think about what changed last

Sites rarely break on their own while nobody is touching them. Ask yourself what happened in the last day or two:

• Did WordPress, a theme, or a plugin update?
• Did you or someone on your team install something new?
• Did your host move you to a new server or a new PHP version?

If a plugin update is the last thing that changed, that is your prime suspect. I wrote a whole post on that situation, what to do when a plugin update breaks your site, because it is that common.

Read what the page is actually telling you

An error message and a blank page are two different problems. A message like "Error establishing a database connection" points at the database or the hosting server. A 500 error points at something crashing in the code. A completely blank white page usually means a PHP error with the error display turned off, which I cover in my post on the white screen of death. Write down the exact words on the screen, or take a screenshot. Guessing wastes time, the message usually names the neighborhood of the problem.

Know when to stop poking at it

Here is the honest part. If you do not have a recent backup, stop making changes. Randomly deleting plugins, editing files, or reinstalling things can turn a thirty-minute fix into a rebuild. Every change you make without a backup is a door you cannot walk back through.

For WordPress sites specifically, I keep a fuller walkthrough in the full WordPress troubleshooting guide, which covers these checks in more depth.

This triage order is exactly how I start every repair session, live on screen share, so you watch each check happen and know why your site went down, not just that it came back. If your site is down right now and you would rather not work through the list alone, that is what the session is for.