Site Down? Here’s What to Check Before You Panic

A website outage always feels like an emergency in the first five minutes. Most of the time it isn’t—it’s something small and fixable. Before you call anyone, spend five minutes figuring out what kind of “down” you’re actually dealing with.

First, figure out what kind of “down” this is

There are really four categories: a domain/DNS problem (the address isn’t pointing anywhere), a hosting problem (the server itself is unreachable), a broken deploy (something you or your team just pushed broke the build), or an actual compromise (the site is up, but it’s not supposed to look like that). Each one has a different fix, so don’t start troubleshooting until you know which bucket you’re in.

Five things to check yourself, in under five minutes

• Is it down for everyone, or just you? Check from your phone on cellular data, not the same WiFi, or use a site like downforeveryoneorjustme.com.
• Check your host’s status page. A provider-wide outage isn’t your bug.
• Did anything change in the last hour? A deploy, a plugin update, a DNS edit — the most recent change is the most likely cause.
• Check whether your domain registration or SSL certificate expired. This causes more “mysterious” outages than anything else.
• Look at the actual error. A 502/504 means the server is struggling; a blank white screen usually means a code error; a browser security warning usually means a certificate or malware issue — they need different fixes.

When it’s a quick fix vs. when you need someone now

If it’s a host-wide outage, you wait. If it’s an expired certificate or a bad DNS record, that’s often a 15-minute fix once someone with access sits down with it. If it’s a broken deploy or you suspect a compromise, that’s when it’s worth getting a second set of eyes immediately — the longer a broken or hacked site stays live, the more it costs you in lost trust and lost business.

If you’ve gone through the list above and you’re still stuck, or you just don’t want to spend your afternoon on it, tell me what’s going on and I’ll tell you honestly whether I can fix it today.