Your site will not load. Before contacting your host — or spending an hour on the wrong thing — it is worth finding out what is actually broken, because "the site is down" covers at least six unrelated failures with entirely different fixes.
Most of them can be ruled out from your own machine in under two minutes.
1. Is it down for everyone, or just you?
Always first, because it splits the problem in half immediately.
Check with the Website Down Checker. It requests the site from our infrastructure, independent of your connection, DNS resolver, ISP and browser.
If we can reach it and you cannot, the problem is local. Skip to step 2.
If we cannot reach it either, the problem is at the site. Skip to step 4.
This one check saves the most time of anything in this list, and it is the step most often skipped.
2. Local problems, in the order worth testing
If the site is up for everyone else, work outwards from your own machine.
Try mobile data. The single most efficient test — a phone off wifi uses different DNS, different routing and a different ISP. If it works there, the problem is your network or your machine, and you have narrowed it enormously in ten seconds.
Try a private window. Rules out extensions, cached redirects and stale cookies. A cached 301 in particular will keep sending you somewhere that no longer exists, entirely from your browser's memory.
Flush your DNS cache. On Windows, ipconfig /flushdns in an admin prompt. On macOS, sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder. Chrome keeps its own cache separately at chrome://net-internals/#dns, which is why a site can fail in Chrome and work in Safari on the same machine.
Disable any VPN or proxy. Some networks and VPN exit nodes are blocked by security services, which produces a very convincing outage affecting only you.
Try a public resolver. Switching to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 rules out your ISP's DNS serving a stale or broken answer.
3. If it works on mobile but not on your network
The problem is your router or your ISP. Restart the router, which resolves more of these than anyone would like to admit. If several devices on the network fail identically and mobile data works, it is upstream of you and there is little to do but wait or contact the ISP.
4. Does the domain still resolve?
Now for genuine outages. This is the first thing to check and the one people reach for last.
Run the domain through the DNS Checker. If there are no A records, or resolvers return NXDOMAIN, the server is not your problem — there is no address to connect to, and your site may be running perfectly behind broken DNS.
Two causes, in order of likelihood:
The domain expired. Check with the WHOIS Lookup. An expired domain stops resolving and produces symptoms identical to a server outage. The status codes are decisive: clientHold or serverHold means the registrar or registry has pulled the domain from DNS, usually over an unpaid renewal or an unverified registrant email. redemptionPeriod means it already lapsed.
The DNS records changed or were lost. Compare the nameservers in the WHOIS result against the provider whose control panel you have been editing. If they disagree, you have been editing records nothing reads — see how to change nameservers.
5. What is the server actually returning?
If DNS resolves, the down checker will show a status code, and it narrows things sharply:
- 500, 502, 503, 504 — the server is running and the application behind it is not. This is not a hosting outage. See what 502, 503 and 504 errors mean.
- 403 — access refused. Often a security service or firewall blocking automated requests rather than a real outage, especially if the site loads for you.
- 404 — the server is fine and that specific path does not exist. Check the URL before anything else.
- 301 or 302 — the site is up and redirecting. If it redirects somewhere wrong or loops, trace it with the Redirect Checker.
- No response at all — nothing is listening. Now it may genuinely be the server.
6. Is it the certificate?
A browser showing a full-page security warning is not an outage, but people report it as one — and the fix is completely different.
Check with the SSL Checker. An expired certificate blocks the page before any content loads, and automated renewal fails silently for weeks beforehand. See why Let's Encrypt renewal fails.
7. Did anything change?
If the server is not responding at all, the question is what changed recently. In rough order of frequency:
- A deployment. Roll it back first and diagnose afterwards.
- A plugin or dependency update.
- A configuration edit — a syntax error in a web server config prevents the service starting at all.
- A disk filling up. Databases and web servers both fail in confusing ways when they cannot write, and logs are usually what filled it.
- A traffic spike, legitimate or otherwise.
- An unpaid hosting invoice. It happens, and the notification went to an address nobody reads.
8. Now contact your host
By this point you can tell them something specific, which gets a useful answer far faster than "my site is down":
- Whether DNS resolves and what it resolves to
- The exact status code, or that there was no response
- When it started, and what changed shortly before
- That you have confirmed it is not local to your connection
Preventing the repeat
Most outages are avoidable failures of attention rather than genuine infrastructure faults.
Monitor uptime externally. A free monitor that checks every few minutes tells you before your customers do. This tool is a spot check, not monitoring.
Monitor certificate and domain expiry. Both fail on a schedule you can see in advance, which makes them the easiest outages in the world to prevent — and among the most common.
Register the domain for multiple years and keep the registrant email at a different domain, monitored by more than one person. See what happens when a domain expires.
Start with the Website Down Checker to establish whether this is your problem or everyone's.