My website is down – help!

You enter your website address and instead of your homepage you see an error, a blank screen or a message saying that the site cannot be reached. Sometimes the problem affects everyone. Sometimes the website works perfectly well for everyone except you!

A website can become unavailable for many reasons: an expired domain, incorrect DNS settings, an SSL certificate problem, a server error, exhausted hosting resources, a failed update or even a temporary issue with your own internet connection.

The good news is that you can narrow down most of these problems step by step. In this guide, we will show you what to check first, what common error messages mean and when the problem should be escalated to your hosting provider or developer.

Website down? Start with a few simple checks

Before changing DNS records, editing WordPress files or restoring backups, make sure that the problem is really on the website side.

• Open another website. If other sites do not load either, check your internet connection.
• Try another browser or private browsing mode. This helps rule out a corrupted browser cache, cookies or an extension.
• Try another device. Open the website on a phone, preferably using mobile data instead of the same Wi-Fi network.
• Ask someone else to open the site. If it works for them, the issue may be local to your device, connection or DNS resolver.
• Check whether only one page is affected. A broken product or article page is a different problem from an entire domain being unavailable.

If the site works on mobile data but not on your home or office network, restarting the router or clearing the local DNS cache may help. DNS changes can also take time to reach different networks, so a recently modified domain may behave differently depending on the connection used.

Check your domain and DNS

A domain is the address people use to reach your website. It is not registered permanently. It must remain active and be renewed according to the rules of its registry and registrar.

If the domain expires, visitors may no longer reach the website. Email addresses that use the same domain may also stop working. This is why checking the domain status should be one of your first steps when both the website and company email suddenly become unavailable.

How can you check whether the domain is active?

• Sign in to the account where the domain was registered and check its expiry or renewal status.
• Make sure that payment for the next registration period has been completed.
• Check whether the registrar has sent any renewal or expiration notifications.
• Verify that the domain is using the correct nameservers.
• If DNS records have recently been changed, confirm that the required A, AAAA or CNAME records point to the correct service.

Do not assume that every domain follows the same expiration process. Renewal, grace and redemption periods depend on the top-level domain and registry rules. If your domain has expired, contact the registrar as soon as possible instead of waiting for the problem to resolve itself.

For business-critical domains, keep the registrant contact details current, enable automatic renewal where available and make sure that the payment method does not expire unnoticed.

Check the SSL certificate and HTTPS connection

Sometimes the server and domain work correctly, but the browser still warns that the connection is not private or refuses to open the website over HTTPS. In that case, the SSL/TLS certificate is one of the first things to inspect.

Common causes include an expired certificate, a certificate issued for a different hostname, an incomplete certificate chain or DNS changes that caused the domain to point to a server on which the expected certificate is not installed.

• Check whether the certificate is still valid.
• Make sure it covers the hostname you use, for example both example.com and www.example.com if both should work.
• Verify that the domain points to the server where the certificate is installed.
• If the certificate should renew automatically, check whether the renewal process completed successfully.
• Avoid ignoring certificate warnings on a production website. They may prevent visitors from trusting or accessing the site.

If your website has recently been migrated to another server, DNS and SSL configuration should be checked together. A correct certificate on the old server will not help if the domain now directs visitors somewhere else.

Pay attention to the error message

The message displayed by the browser or server often tells you which layer of the website is failing. HTTP status codes are divided into several groups. Errors in the 4xx range generally relate to the request or access to a resource, while 5xx responses indicate a server-side problem. You can find the complete list in the MDN HTTP status code documentation.

404 Not Found

A 404 error usually means that the server is available, but the requested resource cannot be found. If only one URL returns 404 while the homepage works, the website itself is not necessarily down. Check whether the page has been deleted, renamed or moved without a redirect.

500 Internal Server Error

A 500 Internal Server Error is a generic server-side error. It can be caused by an application failure, incorrect configuration, a PHP error, permissions, memory problems or another condition that prevents the server from completing the request.

If the error appeared immediately after changing a plugin, theme, PHP version or configuration file, start your investigation there. Server and application logs are usually much more useful than repeatedly refreshing the page.

502 Bad Gateway

A 502 response means that a server acting as a gateway or proxy received an invalid response from another server. Depending on the architecture, the issue may involve a reverse proxy, application server, PHP process or an upstream service.

503 Service Unavailable

A 503 Service Unavailable response means that the server is temporarily unable to handle the request. Typical reasons include maintenance or resource overload. If a 503 keeps returning instead of disappearing after a short period, check the hosting resources and application logs.

DNS and server-not-found errors

Messages such as server not found, DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN or similar DNS-related errors usually point you towards the domain and DNS configuration rather than the website code itself. Check whether the domain is active, the nameservers are correct and the required DNS records exist.

What if a WordPress website stops working?

On WordPress, a website can stop working after a plugin, theme, WordPress core or PHP update. A damaged plugin, incompatible code or exhausted PHP memory can also lead to a critical error or a blank page.

If you can still access the WordPress dashboard, think about what changed immediately before the problem appeared. Deactivate the most recently installed or updated plugin, switch back from a recent change if necessary and check whether the website returns.

If the administration panel is unavailable as well, troubleshooting may require access to the hosting panel, file manager, SFTP or server logs. Before making manual changes, create a backup whenever the current state of the website still allows it.

Use WordPress debugging carefully

WordPress includes built-in debugging tools such as WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG. They can help identify PHP errors generated by themes, plugins or custom code. The official WordPress debugging documentation explains how these options work.

WordPress recommends using debugging primarily in development or staging environments rather than exposing diagnostic messages on a live production site. If debugging must be performed on production, avoid displaying technical errors publicly and disable debugging again after the investigation.

The site stopped working after an update

If the timing is clear, do not immediately update several more components in the hope that the problem will disappear. First identify what changed. Check compatibility information, logs and available backups. If a recent plugin or theme release caused the failure, restoring the previous known-good version may be safer than making unrelated changes across the site.

Check hosting, server resources and recent changes

A working domain and valid SSL certificate do not guarantee that the application behind them is healthy. The server still needs enough resources to process requests, connect to the database and execute the website code.

If the website becomes unavailable mainly during traffic peaks or resource-intensive operations, investigate CPU usage, memory consumption, database load, storage space, PHP workers or other limits available in your hosting environment.

• Check whether your hosting service is active and paid.
• Look for resource-limit warnings in the hosting panel.
• Verify that there is enough free disk space.
• Check application, PHP and web server logs.
• Review changes made shortly before the failure.
• If the website uses a database, confirm that the application can connect to it.
• Check whether a backup from before the failure is available.

When contacting technical support, include the exact domain, the error message, when the problem started, whether it affects the whole website or selected URLs and what changes were made beforehand. A screenshot and an approximate timestamp can make log analysis much faster.

How can you reduce the risk of website downtime?

Not every failure can be prevented, but many avoidable outages start with a missed renewal, an untested update or a configuration change made without a recovery plan.

• Enable automatic domain renewal where your registrar offers it.
• Keep billing and contact details current so renewal notices reach the right person.
• Maintain regular backups and occasionally verify that they can actually be restored.
• Test important updates on a staging environment before deploying them to a business-critical website.
• Keep the CMS, plugins, themes and server software maintained.
• Track resource usage if your website receives highly variable traffic.
• Use HTTPS correctly and make sure certificate renewal is working.
• Document DNS and infrastructure changes so you can reverse them if something goes wrong.
• Monitor availability externally. An uptime service can tell you about a failure before customers report it.

Your website is down. What should you do first?

Start with the simplest explanation and move deeper only when necessary. Check whether the outage affects other users, then verify the domain and DNS, SSL certificate and the exact error returned by the website. If those layers look correct, investigate the hosting environment and the application itself.

If the problem appeared after a recent update or configuration change, that timing is an important clue. Avoid making many unrelated changes at once. Logs, backups and a clear record of what changed will usually lead you to the cause faster.