Articles
Guides to the problems these tools diagnose — written for someone who needs the answer now, not an introduction to the topic.
Website Down Checker
open toolThis Site Can't Be Reached: What Each Error Means
The heading is the same for eight unrelated problems. The line underneath it in small capitals is the one that tells you which stage of the connection failed.
9 min read
Your Site Went Down After a DNS Change
Everyone tells you to wait 48 hours. That is the right answer for one of these six causes and the wrong answer for the other five.
9 min read
What 502, 503 and 504 Errors Actually Mean
A 5xx error is good news in one narrow sense: the machine is alive and talking to you. The application it was supposed to hand off to is not.
8 min read
Your Website Is Down: A Diagnostic Checklist
Most site outages are one of six things, and you can rule out four of them from your own machine in under two minutes.
8 min read
WordPress Theme Detector
open toolHow to Check What WordPress Version a Site Is Running
The meta tag is the first thing every hardening guide tells people to strip, and the feed, the asset URLs and readme.html are the three places they forget.
9 min read
How to Find Which Plugins a WordPress Site Uses
Every plugin loading CSS or JavaScript on the page writes its own name into the HTML. The ones that load nothing stay invisible, and that is most of them.
9 min read
How to Tell If a Site Is Built on WordPress
Any one of the four signals can be switched off in a line of code. The answer is reliable because removing all four, and keeping them removed, is a project.
9 min read
How to Find Out What WordPress Theme a Site Uses
Usually it takes one lookup. When that fails there are three manual methods, and the reason it failed is worth understanding.
7 min read
Domain Name Generator
open tool.com vs .net vs .org: Which Should You Use?
The honest answer is that .com still wins by default — but the reason has nothing to do with search rankings, and there are cases where it is the wrong pick.
9 min read
How to Choose a Domain Name
Most naming advice optimises for cleverness. The constraints that actually matter are duller than that, and every one of them can be checked before you pay.
10 min read
Why Domain Renewal Costs More Than the First Year
The £1 first year is real. So is the £45 renewal twelve months later, and it is usually published in a place nobody looks before checking out.
8 min read
Your Domain Name Is Taken. What Now?
Registered does not mean in use, and it does not always mean unavailable. The WHOIS record tells you which of those you are dealing with.
9 min read
Redirect Checker
open tool301 vs 302: Which Redirect Should You Use?
Pick the wrong one and everything still works perfectly — visitors land where they should, nothing errors, and your rankings quietly stay behind.
8 min read
How to Fix ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS
The browser gives up and shows an error. The server logs look fine. The cause is almost always two rules that each think the other is wrong.
8 min read
Website Speed Test
open toolCore Web Vitals Explained, Without the Jargon
Three metrics, three thresholds, and one distinction that matters more than any of them: the difference between lab data and what your visitors actually experienced.
9 min read
How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint
Everyone tells you to compress your images. That fixes maybe a third of LCP problems, and it is the wrong place to start on the other two thirds.
9 min read
What Is a Good TTFB, and How Do You Improve It?
Every other speed metric is measured from the moment the first byte arrives. Shorten that wait and everything downstream improves for free.
8 min read
DNS Checker
open toolCNAME vs A Record: When to Use Each
They look interchangeable until you try to put a CNAME on your bare domain, at which point everything stops working.
7 min read
How Long Does DNS Propagation Actually Take?
There is no such thing as a standard 24 to 48 hour propagation window. The real number is written in your DNS records, and you can read it.
7 min read
How to Change Nameservers Without Downtime
The change itself takes thirty seconds. The preparation that stops it breaking your email is what most guides leave out.
8 min read
SPF, DKIM and DMARC: Why Your Email Goes to Spam
Three TXT records control whether Gmail trusts your mail. Two of them fail silently, which is why nobody notices until a customer says they never got the invoice.
9 min read
SSL Checker
open toolFixing an Incomplete Certificate Chain
It works in your browser. It fails in curl, on older Androids, and for a slice of your visitors you will never hear from.
7 min read
Why Let's Encrypt Renewal Fails, and How to Fix It
A certificate inside 30 days of expiry does not mean renew it now. It means renewal already failed, and it will fail again in ninety days.
8 min read
Why Your Site Says Not Secure With a Valid Certificate
The certificate is fine. The browser still says Not Secure. These are the four reasons, and only one of them involves the certificate.
10 min read
WHOIS Lookup
open toolHow to Stop Your Domain Being Stolen
Your domain is usually the single most valuable thing your business owns online, and usually the least protected.
8 min read
What Happens When a Domain Expires: The Full Timeline
You do not lose a domain on its expiry date. You lose it about seventy-five days later, and it gets more expensive at every stage.
8 min read
Why WHOIS Data Is Redacted, and How to Contact an Owner
Looking up who owns a domain used to take one command. Since 2018 it usually returns nothing, and the tools claiming otherwise are guessing.
7 min read