My Website Is Down. What to Check First.

Your site is not loading and every minute feels expensive.

Take a breath, because five of the six usual causes are administrative rather than technical. They are things somebody forgot to pay or renew, and you can check most of them yourself in ten minutes.

Work in this order. It runs cheapest and most likely first.

0. Confirm it is actually down

Before anything else, pull out your phone and turn wifi off.

If the site loads on cellular, your site is fine and something local is broken: your computer, your router, your office network, or a cached copy in your browser. You would be surprised how often the emergency is one browser on one machine.

Also try a private window and a different browser. Same idea, ten seconds.

1. Did the domain expire

The most common cause, and the most preventable.

Do a whois lookup on your domain and read the expiry date. If it has passed, that is your answer and nothing else matters.

Renew it immediately at your registrar. Do not let it sit, because after a grace period a lapsed domain can be released and bought by somebody else, and that is the one failure on this list that can be permanent.

Once renewed, allow up to 24 to 48 hours for everything to settle back to normal.

2. Is the hosting bill unpaid

Second most common. A card expired, an invoice went to an email nobody reads, and the host suspended the account.

The tell is often a page from the hosting company rather than a browser error. Log in to your host and check for an outstanding balance or a suspension notice. Paying it usually restores the site within minutes.

If you do not know who your host is, look for recurring charges on your bank statement, or ask whoever built the site.

3. Is the security certificate expired

If visitors see a full page warning about the connection not being private, or the address bar says not secure, that is a certificate that lapsed.

The site itself is generally fine. Browsers just refuse to show it without a warning, and the warning is severe enough that visitors leave immediately.

Most hosts reissue certificates the same day, and many do it automatically once someone tells them to. This is a renewal, not a rebuild, and nobody should be quoting you a project for it.

4. Is the host having an outage

Search for your hosting company plus the word status. Most publish a status page, and a genuine outage will be posted there.

If it is a host outage, there is nothing to fix on your end. What you can do is post on your social accounts and update your voicemail so customers reaching a dead site know you are still open.

5. Did something update and break

If the site was touched recently, a plugin, theme, or platform update is a strong candidate. A white screen or a page of error text points this way.

The fix is a restore from backup rather than a hunt for the broken line. This is the moment you find out whether you have backups, which is a question worth answering before you need the answer.

6. Has it been hacked

Signs: redirects to a site you do not recognize, unfamiliar content, a browser or search warning that the site may be harmful, or your host taking it offline without a billing reason.

This is the slow one. It needs a clean restore from a known good backup, then closing whatever way they got in, then requesting a review to clear any warnings. Patching what you can see and moving on generally means doing it again in three weeks.

What to say when you call

Have this ready and the call takes five minutes instead of thirty.

• Your domain name.
• What exactly appears on screen, read out word for word.
• When it last worked.
• Anything that changed: an update, a payment, a new plugin, an email from the host.
• Whether it fails on cellular too.

Preventing the next one

Three items, and together they eliminate most of this list.

Auto renew on the domain, with a card that is current and an email somebody reads. Automatic backups you have actually tested restoring. Uptime monitoring, so you find out from an alert rather than from a customer.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Most small businesses learn their site is down from someone mentioning it, which means it was down for hours first.

If you cannot get into any of these accounts to check, that is its own problem and it has its own guide: my web designer disappeared.

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We handle hosting, renewals, certificates, backups, and monitoring so this list stops being your job. See website management, or if your site is down right now, send us the domain and we will tell you which of the six it is.