What to Do When Your Website Goes Down (A Step-by-Step Guide)
A customer just told you your website is down. Or maybe you tried to pull it up yourself and got a blank page, a spinning wheel, or one of those cryptic error messages that might as well be written in Klingon.
Your stomach drops. You don't know who to call, what to check, or how long it's been like this. For all you know, it's been down since Tuesday and you've been losing leads the entire time.
Here's the thing: when your website goes down, the fix is usually simpler than you think. But panicking and clicking random buttons in your hosting dashboard can make things worse. So let me walk you through exactly what to do, step by step, starting from the moment you realize something is wrong.
First, Confirm Your Website Is Actually Down
Before you do anything else, make sure the problem isn't on your end. Your own internet connection, browser cache, or DNS settings could be showing you a broken page that everyone else sees just fine.
Here's how to check:
Try a different device. Pull up your site on your phone (using cellular data, not your Wi-Fi). If it loads fine on your phone but not your computer, the problem is local to your machine or network.
Use a free monitoring tool. Sites like downforeveryoneorjustme.com or isitdownrightnow.com will check your URL from an external server. If they confirm your site is down, it's down for everyone.
Ask someone else. Text a friend or colleague and ask them to visit your site right now. Low-tech, but it works.
If the site is only down for you, try clearing your browser cache, flushing your DNS cache, or switching to a different browser. If it's down for everyone, keep reading.
Check the Obvious Stuff First
Most website outages aren't caused by hackers or catastrophic server failures. They're caused by boring, preventable things.
Did your domain expire? This is more common than you'd think. Log into your domain registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, whoever you bought your domain from) and check the expiration date. If it lapsed, you usually have a grace period to renew it. Set it to auto-renew after you fix it.
Did your hosting payment fail? If your credit card on file expired or your hosting bill bounced, some hosts will suspend your account. Log into your hosting dashboard and check for billing alerts.
Did you (or someone) make a recent change? If you updated a plugin, changed a setting, or edited a file right before the outage, that's almost certainly the cause. WordPress sites are especially prone to this. One bad plugin update can bring the whole thing down.
Check your email. Your hosting provider may have already sent you a notice explaining the issue. Look for emails from your host, your domain registrar, or your SSL certificate provider. The answer might be sitting in your inbox.
What the Error Message Is Telling You
If your browser is showing an error instead of a blank page, that error is a clue. You don't need to understand the technical details, but knowing the general category helps you figure out who to call.
"This site can't be reached" or "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN": This usually means a DNS issue. Your domain isn't pointing to a server. Could be an expired domain, a DNS misconfiguration, or a propagation delay after a recent change.
"500 Internal Server Error": Something broke on the server side. Often caused by a bad plugin, a corrupted file, or a server configuration problem. This is the one where you call your developer or hosting support.
"503 Service Unavailable": The server is overloaded or down for maintenance. Sometimes temporary, sometimes not. If it persists for more than 15 minutes, contact your host.
"403 Forbidden": The server is refusing to show you the page. Could be a permissions issue, an IP block, or a security plugin that got overzealous.
"ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR" or "Your connection is not private": Your SSL certificate has expired or is misconfigured. If you're on a maintenance plan, this should never happen because SSL renewal is handled automatically. If you're not, check with your host or whoever manages your certificate.
Blank white page: Often called the "white screen of death" in WordPress circles. Usually a PHP error or a theme/plugin conflict. Requires someone with server access to diagnose.
When Your Website Goes Down, Who Do You Call?
Knowing who to call matters almost as much as knowing the fix. Here's the priority:
Your web developer or maintenance provider. If you have one, they should be your first call. A good maintenance provider will already know about the issue because they're monitoring your site. If they don't know about it, that's a red flag.
Your hosting provider. If you don't have a dedicated developer, go straight to your host's support. Most hosts have 24/7 chat or phone support. Have your account info ready. Tell them: "My site is down, here's the error I'm seeing, and here's what I've already checked." They deal with this daily and can usually narrow it down quickly.
Your domain registrar (if it's a DNS issue). If the error points to DNS, and your domain registrar is different from your hosting provider, you may need to contact both.
One thing I'd avoid: Googling the error and trying to follow random forum advice to fix it yourself. If you're not comfortable on the command line or in your hosting's file manager, you can easily make the problem worse. There's no shame in calling for help. That's what support teams are for.
How Long Has It Been Down?
This is the question most business owners forget to ask, and it's one of the most important.
If you don't have uptime monitoring set up, you have no way of knowing when the outage started. It could have been five minutes ago. It could have been three days ago. Every hour your site is down, you're losing potential customers who are landing on a broken page and clicking back to the search results.
Set up monitoring. UptimeRobot has a free tier that checks your site every 5 minutes and sends you an email or text when it goes down. It takes about 2 minutes to configure. There's no reason not to have this running.
If you want to know how much downtime costs, here's a rough way to think about it: look at how many leads or sales your website generates per month, divide by 720 (hours in a month), and that's what each hour of downtime costs you. For a business that gets 30 leads a month from their site, that's roughly one lead lost every 24 hours of downtime. Doesn't sound like much until you realize those leads might be worth $500-$5,000 each.
What Your Website Goes Down Checklist Looks Like
Here's the condensed version you can save for the next time something breaks:
- Confirm the site is down for everyone, not just you
- Check your domain registration status
- Check your hosting account for billing issues or notices
- Note the error message (screenshot it)
- Contact your developer or maintenance provider
- If no developer, contact your hosting provider's support
- Don't make changes yourself unless you know what you're doing
- Once it's fixed, ask what caused it and how to prevent it
- Set up UptimeRobot if you haven't already
- Consider a maintenance plan so someone is watching before you are
How a Maintenance Plan Prevents Most Outages
I'll be straightforward: I run a web maintenance company, so I have a stake in this. But I'm also telling you this because it's true.
The majority of outages I deal with fall into a few categories: expired domains, expired SSL certificates, failed updates, maxed-out storage, and security breaches from outdated software. Every one of those is preventable with regular monitoring and maintenance.
At Red Rock, our $150/month maintenance plan includes domain and SSL monitoring, daily backups, security scanning, and uptime monitoring. If something goes down, I know about it before you do, usually within 5 minutes. That's not a sales pitch, it's just what the service does.
That said, if your site is a simple brochure page that doesn't generate leads or revenue, paying $150/month for maintenance might not make sense. You might be better off setting up UptimeRobot yourself and checking your domain renewal date once a year. I'd rather tell you that than sell you something you don't need.
For businesses where the website is an active part of how you get customers, the math is different. One prevented outage that would have cost you a weekend of lost leads pays for months of maintenance.
If you want to see what's included, check our website maintenance checklist for the full rundown of what should be happening on a regular basis.
After It's Back Up: What to Do Next
Getting the site back online is step one. Here's what to do after:
Ask what caused it. Get a clear answer from whoever fixed it. "Server issue" is not an answer. You need to know the specific cause so you can prevent it.
Check that everything works. Don't just load the homepage and call it good. Click through your main pages, test your contact form, check your booking links, and make sure your images load. Sometimes a fix resolves the main issue but leaves other things broken.
Check Google Search Console. If your site was down for more than a few hours, Google may have tried to crawl it and gotten errors. Log into Search Console, go to the Pages report, and see if any new crawl errors showed up. These usually resolve on their own once the site is back up, but it's worth checking.
Review your website security setup. If the outage was caused by a hack, a malware injection, or a brute-force attack, you need to do more than just restore from backup. You need to find and close the vulnerability. Otherwise it'll happen again.
Document it. Write down what happened, when, how long it lasted, and how it was resolved. If it happens again, you'll have a reference point instead of starting from scratch.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long is too long for a website to be down?
Any downtime over a few minutes is worth investigating. For a business website that generates leads, even an hour can mean lost revenue. If your site has been down for more than 4-6 hours without anyone working on it, something has gone wrong with your support process, not just your server.
Will my SEO rankings drop if my website goes down?
Short outages (under a few hours) usually don't affect rankings. Google's crawlers are patient and will retry. But if your site is down for a full day or more, Google may temporarily drop your pages from search results. The pages typically come back once the site is stable again, but repeated outages signal to Google that your site isn't reliable. That can have lasting effects.
Should I post on social media that my website is down?
Only if you're getting customer inquiries about it. For most small businesses, a brief downtime window goes unnoticed by most visitors. If it's extended (several hours or more) and you're actively getting messages, a short social post acknowledging the issue and giving an alternative contact method (phone number, email) is the right move. Keep it brief and factual.
Can I fix my website myself if it goes down?
It depends on the cause. If your domain expired, you can renew it yourself. If your hosting payment failed, you can update your billing info. But if it's a server error, a security issue, or a code problem, you're better off contacting your host or a developer. Attempting fixes you don't fully understand, like editing server configuration files, can turn a temporary outage into a permanent one.
How do I prevent my website from going down in the future?
Set up uptime monitoring (UptimeRobot is free), enable auto-renewal on your domain and SSL certificate, keep your software updated, maintain regular backups, and consider a maintenance plan if your website is important to your business. Most outages are caused by things that are easy to prevent with basic maintenance habits.
Get Ahead of It
Your website is going to go down at some point. Every site does. The difference between a 10-minute blip and a three-day disaster comes down to preparation: monitoring, backups, and having someone to call.
If you already have those things in place, you'll handle it fine. If you don't, now's the time to set them up. Not after the next outage.
Need someone watching your site so you don't have to? Let's talk about what makes sense for your business.
