Web Design · Hosting
Most outages have boring causes, so check the boring things first, in order, before you call anyone or start restoring backups.
First, check it isn’t just you
Domain and hosting bills cause many outages
Know who to call before you need them
Tell us what you need and we’ll get back to you. Or book a free 30-minute call. Or call 954-539-5678.
When a site goes down, people call whoever they think of first, usually the web designer, who may not have touched it in three years. Slow down for five minutes. In my experience most outages come from one of six causes, and you can rule out several yourself before you talk to anyone. Check them in this order: is it just you, is the domain still yours and pointing to the right place, is the hosting account active, is the SSL certificate valid, did a plugin or theme update break something, and has the site been hacked. The first three are boring and account for a surprising share of outages. Boring is good. Boring is quick to fix.
Open the site on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off, then try a checker such as downforeveryoneorjustme.com. If it loads elsewhere, the problem is your office network, your browser cache or a firewall rule, and the website is fine. Clear the cache, try another browser, and if only the office can’t reach it, ask whoever runs your network whether your IP has been blocked by the host’s firewall (it happens after a few wrong password attempts).
Look the domain up on ICANN’s free lookup tool (lookup.icann.org) and read the expiry date. An expired domain is the classic cause of a site and email going down on the same morning. If the date is fine, check that the domain’s DNS still points to your host. An error like DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN in Chrome usually means the browser can’t find the domain at all. If someone changed nameservers recently (a new email provider, a well-meaning nephew), that’s your suspect.
Log into the hosting account, or find the last invoice. Hosts suspend accounts for unpaid bills, for an expired card, and sometimes for using too many resources on cheap shared plans. The symptom is often a generic “account suspended” page or a 403 error. If you don’t know who the host is, that is a finding in itself. Keep reading.
If visitors see “Your connection is not private” or ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID, the certificate has probably expired. This is more common than it used to be. Under the CA/Browser Forum rules, certificates issued since March 15, 2026 last at most 200 days, falling to 100 days in March 2027. Any certificate that someone renews by hand once a year is now a scheduled outage. Ask your host to reissue it and set it to renew automatically.
On WordPress, a white screen or the message “There has been a critical error on this website” almost always means a plugin, theme or PHP version change crashed it. WordPress usually emails the admin address a recovery-mode link so you can log in and deactivate the culprit. If that email went to someone who left, your host can rename the plugin folder to switch it off. A 500 error points the same way. A 502 or 503 is more often the server itself struggling, which is the host’s problem to solve.
Signs: the site redirects to something unpleasant, Google shows “This site may be hacked” in results, or browsers show a red warning. Google’s Safe Browsing site status page will tell you whether it has flagged the site. A hack is the one case where I wouldn’t try to fix it yourself; restoring a backup without closing the hole just reopens it. Our guide to a hacked WordPress site covers what to do first.
For Google, a few hours is not a disaster. Google’s guidance on pausing a site suggests serving a 503 status (“come back later”) for a day or two, and warns that keeping a whole site offline for more than a few days means pages start dropping out of the index, with no fixed time for them to come back. So an afternoon is an annoyance. A week is a problem.
For your business, the honest answer depends on what the site does. A brochure site down for an afternoon costs you a few inquiries. A shop or a booking system down on a Monday morning costs real money by lunchtime. If you’d like someone to look over your setup and tell you where the weak points are, book a free 30-minute call and we’ll say what we’d change first.
In my experience, the slow outages are rarely the technically hard ones. They’re slow because nobody knows who to call. Picture the usual version: the domain sits in a former employee’s personal account, the hosting login belongs to a designer who has moved on, and the WordPress admin password was on a sticky note that went in the trash during an office move. Each of those turns a twenty-minute fix into a three-day hunt.
So, this week, while the site is up, write down five things and put them where two people in the company can find them:
If you can’t fill in that list, that is the problem to solve before the next outage. Our piece on who owns your website covers getting the accounts back into the company’s name. For what it’s worth, this is also why our hosting includes constant automated monitoring and malware cleanup: we’d rather find out the site is down before you do.
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Try it on your phone with Wi-Fi turned off, then use a free checker such as downforeveryoneorjustme.com. If it loads on mobile data and for the checker, the problem is your office network or computer, not the site.
A short outage usually doesn’t do lasting harm. Google’s guidance on pausing a site suggests a 503 status for a day or two, and warns that if a whole site stays offline for more than a few days, pages start dropping out of the index, with no fixed time for recovery. So fix it quickly and, for planned maintenance, have the server return a 503.
That is WordPress telling you some code, usually a plugin or theme, crashed the site. WordPress normally emails the site’s admin address a recovery-mode link that lets you log in and switch off the offending plugin. Check that inbox, including spam.
Usually not. Most often the SSL certificate has expired or failed to renew. Certificates now last at most 200 days for anything issued since March 15, 2026, so automatic renewal matters more than it used to. Your host can usually reissue one within minutes.
