Your website is down: what to check first

A customer texts you on a Tuesday morning: your website will not open. You try it on your laptop and get an error page you have never seen. Most outages come from a short list of causes, and you can narrow it down in about ten minutes without knowing any code. The order matters, because the first checks are the fastest and they tell you who to call.

First, find out whether it is down for everyone

Turn off Wi-Fi on your phone and open the site on cell data. If it loads there, the site is probably fine and the problem is your office internet or your computer. Ask the customer which device they used too, since one person seeing an error is weak evidence.

If the site fails on your phone and your laptop, treat it as a real outage and write down the time. Your hosting company will ask when it started, and you will want that time later if you need to explain lost orders or calls.

Read the words on the error page

The error message is the best clue you have. Take a screenshot before you refresh. These are the ones a small business sees most often:

• "This site can't be reached" or DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN: the browser cannot find your address. Look at your domain first, since it may have expired or had its settings changed.
• "Your connection is not private": your security certificate expired or is broken. The site is often still running, but most visitors will turn back.
• 500 Internal Server Error: something broke on the server, often right after an update or a change to a plugin.
• 503 Service Unavailable: the server is overloaded or in maintenance. It can clear by itself, so check again in a few minutes before you escalate.
• 404 Not Found: the site is up, but that one page is gone or moved. Check whether your home page still opens.
• A blank white page: common on WordPress after a plugin or theme update.

Check the domain, because this one is painful and common

A domain is your address on the internet, and you rent it year by year. If the renewal card expired or the reminder went to an old employee's inbox, the address can stop working while the site itself sits there untouched. You can look up the expiry date on ICANN's public lookup tool at lookup.icann.org. Type your domain and read the expiration date.

If it has expired, log in at the company where you bought it and renew right away. There is usually a grace period, and its length depends on that company. After a renewal, the site can take a while to come back as the change spreads across the internet. If you do not know who holds the account, sort that out this week even after the site is back.

Call the right person with the right facts

Your hosting company is the business that keeps your website's files on its computers. If the domain is fine, this is your next call. Open a support ticket or start a chat and give them these details so nobody has to ask twice:

1. The exact website address that is failing.
2. The time you first noticed it.
3. A screenshot of the error.
4. Anything that changed recently, such as an update, a new plugin, a new form or a designer logging in.
5. Whether it fails on cell data as well as your office connection.

That fourth item solves more outages than anything else. If someone updated the site last night, a restore from the latest backup is often the quickest way back. Ask your host whether a backup exists and from what date before anyone starts changing files.

Signs it was hacked and not simply broken

Slow down if the site opens but shows pages you did not write, sends visitors to another site, or triggers a red browser warning about harmful content. Those point to a break-in. Ask your host to look at it, change your website and hosting passwords, and restore from a backup taken before the problem began. Fixing the visible damage alone tends to leave the back door open, so the same thing returns a few days later.

Keep the phones working while it is down

Customers still need to reach you during the outage. Post your phone number on your Google Business Profile and your social pages, and tell your team what to say when someone calls about the site. Check your contact form after the site returns as well. Send a test message to yourself, because forms sometimes stay broken after the pages come back, and nobody notices until the leads have been missing for a week.

Set things up so you hear about it first

An uptime monitor is a small service that visits your site every few minutes and sends you a message when it stops answering. With one in place you learn about an outage from an alert, ahead of your customers.

Write the rest on one page and keep it somewhere that does not depend on your website: who holds your domain, who hosts the site, how to reach their support, where backups live and who has the logins. If you would like a second pair of eyes on that page, you can message us through https://netwebmedia.com/whatsapp.html.

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