What to Do If Your Website Goes Down (A Calm Checklist)

If your website goes down, don't panic and don't start changing things at random. Most outages come down to a small number of causes, and you can usually work out which one in about ten minutes. Below is the order I'd check things in, what to say to your web person or host, and how to stop it happening again.

First: is it actually down?

Before anything else, make sure it's the website and not your connection.

• Try a different device and network. Turn Wi-Fi off on your phone and load the site over mobile data. If it works there, the problem may be your office broadband or router, not the site.
• Use an outside checker. Sites like Down For Everyone Or Just Me will try to load your site from elsewhere and tell you whether it's down for everyone.
• Note the time and what you see. A blank page, a browser security warning, a "502" or "503" error, or a "this domain is for sale" page all point to different causes. A screenshot will save a lot of back and forth later.

The usual suspects

1. The domain name has expired

This is one of the most common causes for small businesses, and it's completely avoidable. Domains are rented, usually a year or two at a time. If the renewal email went to an old address or the card on file expired, the domain can lapse. When that happens, your website and any email on that domain can stop working at the same time.

Clue: you see a parking page, an advert page, or nothing at all, and your business email has gone quiet too.

What to do: log in to wherever you bought the domain and renew it straight away. You can usually recover it for a while after it lapses, but don't count on that. Act the same day.

2. The security certificate (SSL) has expired

Your site's padlock comes from an SSL certificate, and these expire too. Many hosts renew them automatically, but it doesn't always work.

Clue: the browser shows a full-screen warning such as "Your connection is not private" instead of your site.

What to do: contact your host or web developer. It's normally a quick fix on their end. You can check when your certificate and domain are due to expire with the free SSL & Domain Expiry Checker.

3. A hosting problem

Your website lives on a server run by a hosting company. If they're having an outage, or your account has been suspended (often over an unpaid invoice or using more resources than your plan allows), the site goes offline.

Clue: error pages mentioning "500", "502", "503" or "server", or a hosting company's "account suspended" page.

What to do: check your host's status page and your email for anything from them, including the spam folder. If there's a known outage, there's not much to do but wait. If your account's been suspended, that needs sorting with them directly.

4. Something changed on the site

If the site broke right after an update, a new plugin, a theme change or someone "just tweaking something", that's very likely the cause.

Clue: it was fine yesterday, someone touched it today.

What to do: stop making further changes. Tell your developer exactly what was changed and when. If you have a recent backup, restoring it is often the quickest route back.

5. DNS settings were changed

DNS is the bit that points your domain name at your hosting. If someone has moved hosts, set up new email, or changed settings at the domain company, the site can stop loading.

What to do: ask whoever made the change to check it. Don't guess at DNS settings yourself; it's easy to break email in the process.

What to tell your host or developer

You'll get help faster if you send all of this in one message:

• your domain name
• when you first noticed the problem
• exactly what you see (a screenshot is best)
• whether it's down on mobile data too
• anything that changed recently (updates, payments, new email set-up)

Will this hurt my Google rankings?

A short outage, a few hours or so, is very unlikely to do lasting damage. Google's own documentation says server errors make it slow down how often it crawls your site, and it picks back up once things are working again.

Longer outages are a different story. Google's John Mueller has said that if a site is down for more than a day or two, pages can start to drop out of search results. They generally come back once the site's up again, but it can take time for rankings to settle. That's the real reason to treat downtime as urgent: the longer it lasts, the more it can cost you.

If you ever need to take your site offline on purpose, for example during a rebuild, ask your developer to show a proper "503" maintenance page rather than just switching it off. That tells Google it's temporary.

How to stop it happening again

• Put renewals on auto-renew and make sure the card on file is current.
• Use an email address you actually check for your domain and hosting accounts, not an old one or someone who's since left.
• Know who has the logins. Keep a note of where your domain is registered and who hosts your site.
• Have backups. Ask your host or developer how often the site is backed up and how quickly it can be restored.
• Set up uptime monitoring. There are free services that check your site every few minutes and email you if it goes down, so you hear about it before a customer does.

Want someone else to keep an eye on it?

My Website & SEO Support covers the regular checks, renewals and fixes so outages are caught early or don't happen at all. If you'd like the bigger picture on why sites need ongoing care, have a read of why websites need looking after, not just launching.