What To Do When Your Website Goes Down

What it looks like

In the lifetime of your website, regardless of who builds it, it will likely go down. When your website is ‘down’ it can look like a few things in your browser:

• A blank screen with a small error message in the top left.
• A styled page with a message along the lines of “your connection is insecure” or “certificate not trusted”.
• A completely blank screen with no text.
• Loading for a long time before the browser says the connection has timed out.

First 3 things to do

Regardless of why your website is down, there are three things you can do before digging into anything. If you’re having trouble with any of the following jargon, try reading Our Technical Jargon Dictionary to see if it helps.

1. Contact your website host as soon as you can! They are in charge of keeping your website online 24/7.
2. Check your accounts/services linked to the website such as, registrar/domain account, hosting account, DNS hosting accounts, SSL certificates, CDN’s, etc. Sometimes a payment method fails causing recurring services not to be renewed. Or, sometimes services such as an SSL Certificate need to be manually renewed.
3. Contact your IT team if you have one. They might have some insight on if there’s anything internal going on at the moment that might have a side effect of the website being down.

General causes of a website being down

A blank screen with a small error message in the top left

For PHP based websites, this is normal behavior if it happens once in a blue moon for less than an hour. This generally indicates server maintenance, or a brief spike in traffic that the server couldn’t handle. However, if this is happening regularly, contacting your host is the way to go. You may need to upgrade your hosting plan to handle more traffic, or, it could indicate a poor quality host.

A styled page with a message along the lines of “your connection is insecure” or “certificate not trusted”

This is the browser’s way of telling you the website’s SSL Certificate is not configured correctly. Either it has expired, or is incorrectly certified. Usually logging in to your host or registrar (wherever your SSL Certificate is held) and renewing your certificate will fix this. Beyond that, contacting whomever holds your SSL Certificate is your next step.

A completely blank screen with no text

This almost always means a problem with WordPress or a database, rather than the server. There are 1001 different reasons this could be happening, so get in touch with the folks in charge of maintaining your website. For those on our Maintenance & Care plans, that would be us!

Loading for a long time before the browser says the connection has timed out

This is the most elusive of the other reasons covered so far. Check to see if it’s just your website behaving this way, or if it’s multiple. If multiple sites are doing this, it could be your internet connection. If it’s just yours, your website could be suffering performance issues, or it could be the server it’s hosted on having performance issues. Either way, it’s best to first contact your host, and see what they say. If it’s website performance issues, next would be to contact the folks in charge of maintaining your website. For those on our Maintenance & Care plans, that would be us!

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