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Your website is down: a checklist for site owners
When your own site goes down, the panic makes it hard to think in order. This is the order. Most outages on small business and personal sites come from a handful of causes, and you can check each one in a few minutes.
First, confirm it's down for everyone
Run your address through the checker. If it says the site is up, the problem is your connection, not your site. If it's down, write down the exact reason and code it gives. That narrows things fast:
| Checker says | Look at first |
|---|---|
| Doesn't exist | Domain expired, or DNS records deleted. Start at step 1. |
| Certificate broken | Your SSL certificate expired. Jump to step 3. |
| 500 to 504 | Hosting or your site's code. Steps 4 and 5. |
| 521 / 522 | Cloudflare works but your server behind it doesn't. Step 4. |
| No answer / timeout | Server off, overloaded, or suspended. Step 4. |
1. Did the domain expire?
Log in to wherever you bought the domain (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Porkbun, Squarespace and so on) and check the expiry date. This is the most common cause of a small business site vanishing overnight, usually because the card on file expired before the renewal did. Most registrars hold an expired domain for a grace period, often around 30 days, where you can still renew at the normal price. Renew it, then turn on auto-renew with a card that won't expire soon.
2. Did someone change the DNS?
DNS records point your domain at your server. If anyone switched hosts, edited records or moved the domain recently, a wrong or missing record can take the whole site down. Compare the records in your registrar's dashboard with what your host tells you to use. After a fix, changes can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to reach everyone.
3. Did the SSL certificate expire?
Free certificates from Let's Encrypt last 90 days and renew automatically, until the automation breaks. When that happens, browsers show visitors a full-page security warning and most of them leave. Your host's control panel usually has a "renew" or "reissue" button. If you're behind Cloudflare, check the SSL settings there too.
4. Is the host having a problem?
Check your hosting company's status page and your account dashboard. Two things to look for: a reported outage, which means waiting it out, and a suspended account, which usually means a failed payment or a usage limit. Also check whether the server has run out of disk space. A full disk stops databases cold, and the site goes down with it.
5. What changed recently?
If the site broke right after an update, the update is the prime suspect. On WordPress that's usually a plugin or theme update. If you can still get into the admin, deactivate whatever changed most recently. If you can't, most hosts let you rename the plugin's folder through their file manager, which switches it off. For sites you deploy yourself, roll back to the last version that worked, then figure out why.
While you fix it, tell people
A short post on your social accounts ("Our site is down, we're on it, orders still work by phone at ...") stops the same question arriving 40 times. If you have regular customers with orders in progress, a quick email does the same job.
Make the next one shorter
- Turn on auto-renew for the domain, and set your own calendar reminder a month before it expires anyway.
- Set up uptime monitoring that texts you when the site goes down, so you hear about it before a customer does. Our uptime guide explains what to look for.
- Keep automatic backups somewhere other than your hosting account, and test restoring one at least once.
- Write down where everything lives: registrar, host, DNS, logins. Outages run longest when nobody remembers which company the domain is with.
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