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Website is down? What to check, in order

When it breaks 6 min read

A calm order of checks for a site that will not load, so you know within ten minutes whether the problem is the host, the name, or your own phone.

You typed your own address into your phone and got nothing back. A gray page, or a circle that spins and never finishes. You have a job at ten, and no way of knowing whether every customer who looks you up this morning is seeing what you are seeing.

Work through these in order. It takes about ten minutes, costs nothing, and at the end you will know which of four separate problems you have.

Prove it is down, and not just down for you

A site can look dead from your kitchen and be perfectly fine everywhere else. Your phone may be holding an old copy of the page. Your broadband may have a lookup stuck. Rule that out before you call anybody.

Open the site on a second device using mobile data rather than your wifi. Then try it in a private or incognito window, which ignores whatever your browser saved earlier. Then ask somebody who is not in your building to type the address and read you exactly what they see.

While you are at it, type the address both ways, with the www at the front and without it. If one of them loads and the other does not, the site itself is alive and something in the routing of its name is wrong. That is a smaller problem than a dead server, and whoever you call will want to know it.

Read the error, because it is naming the broken part

Different failures produce different words, and the words point at who can fix it.

Write the exact words down, with the time you first saw them. You will be asked for both.

Find out who you actually pay, and for what

Two different companies keep a small website alive, and owners are rarely told this in plain words. One rents you the name. The other rents you the space the pages sit in. They send separate bills, they have separate logins, and either can fail on its own while the other is perfectly healthy.

If you cannot name them, search your email for the word renewal, then for invoice, then read last year's card statement for anything that repeats. Whoever turns up there is who you call. Not knowing is normal: it gets set up once, in a week when you were busy, and never mentioned again.

Check the two dates that quietly run out

The first date is the domain registration, which is bought by the year. When it lapses the name stops resolving, and if your email runs on that same name your email stops with it. The screen usually says the address could not be found.

The second is the security certificate, which is issued for a much shorter period and is normally renewed automatically in the background. When that renewal breaks, the pages are still there but the browser stands in front of them with a warning.

Each has its own fix, and neither is a hosting fault, so working out which you are looking at saves an hour on the phone to the wrong company.

Call the host, and know what to say first

Support queues move faster on specifics. Have ready: your domain name, the error word for word, the time it started, and anything that changed recently. A replaced card, an update, somebody doing work on the site. Changes that seem unrelated are often the cause.

Then ask two questions plainly. Is there an outage affecting the server my account is on, and is my account current and paid. Those two answers cover most of what you cannot see from the outside. Get a ticket number before you hang up, or you start from the beginning with the next person.

Tell your customers before they find it themselves

Your Google Business Profile is a separate thing from your website and does not go down when the website does. It carries your number, your hours and your reviews, and you can post to it. That is where you say the site is having trouble and give the number to call instead.

Change your voicemail greeting to match. If inquiries normally reach you through a form on the site, say plainly that anything sent today may not have arrived, and ask people to call or text. An outage costs you the inquiries you never hear about, so the object is to give them another door.

Do not let one bad morning become a bad week

Two things turn an outage into something worse.

The first is rebuilding in a panic. Do not buy a second domain to get something up, and do not reinstall anything while you still do not know what broke. A site that is merely switched off can be switched back on. A site half replaced at midnight is a longer job, and none of that is your fault for trying.

The second is a stranger. Somebody who calls offering to fix a site they somehow already know is down is not help. Do not give a caller card details, a password, or access to your domain account.

A short checklist

Questions people ask

How do I know if my website is down for everyone or just me

Try it on a phone using mobile data instead of your wifi, and ask somebody in another building to load it. If it works for them, the problem is between your own connection and the site, not the site itself.

Why does my website work on my computer but not on my phone

Your computer may be showing you a saved copy of a page that no longer loads fresh. A private window on the computer usually settles it, because that window ignores what was saved.

Who should I call first when my site goes down

The hosting company, unless the error says the address could not be found, in which case start with whoever you buy the domain name from. The error wording tells you which.

How long should an outage take to fix

It depends on what broke. A server problem at the host runs to their timescale. A lapsed payment is fixed the moment the payment goes through. A hacked site is the long one, because it has to be cleaned before it can go back up.

Will a few hours of downtime hurt my Google ranking

Nobody outside Google can tell you exactly, and anyone who gives you a number is guessing. A short outage is a different situation from a site that has been unreachable for weeks. The inquiries lost while the phone number was invisible are the certain cost.

It came back on its own, do I need to do anything

Yes, find out why. A site that recovered without anybody touching it will usually go down again, and next time it may not be a morning you can spare.

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