Is my website down, or is it just me?

The fastest way to find out is to check from somewhere that is not your computer or your office network. Our free site check does that from our servers, reads the error your site returns, and tells you which kind of problem it is. If you would rather read first, here is what each symptom usually means.

Check from outside your own network first

A site can be fine for the world and broken for you alone: your browser is holding an old DNS answer, your office firewall is blocking it, or your own IP got rate-limited. A check from another network settles that in seconds. Our free site check runs from our servers, follows redirects, and reports the status code, the certificate, the DNS answer and the host it reached.

What the error on screen tells you

  • A blank white page: PHP stopped with a fatal error, usually a plugin, theme or PHP version change.
  • "500 Internal Server Error": the server ran the site and it crashed; the error log on the host says why.
  • "502 Bad Gateway" or "504 Gateway Timeout": the web server is up but PHP behind it is down or overloaded.
  • "Error establishing a database connection": the database is down, full, or the login in wp-config no longer matches.
  • "This site can't be reached" or "server IP address could not be found": a DNS or domain problem, including an expired domain.
  • "Your connection is not private": the SSL certificate expired or was issued for a different name.
  • A page from your host saying the account is suspended: billing, a resource limit, or an abuse report.
  • A Cloudflare page with a 52x code: Cloudflare is up but cannot reach your server.

Three things to try before you call anyone

  • Open your host's status page and your host account. An outage on their side or an unpaid invoice explains more downtime than any plugin.
  • Check the domain has not expired. Search the domain at a WHOIS lookup; an expired domain shows a parking page or nothing at all.
  • If the site went down right after you changed something, undo that change. For a plugin, rename its folder over SFTP and reload.

When it is worth paying someone

If none of the above brings it back within half an hour, every further hour costs you more than the fix does. Our site-down fix has a fixed price, starts the same day during service hours, and you are only charged when the site is back and you approve. If we cannot bring it back, the hold on your card is released and you pay nothing.

Questions people ask

My site works on my phone but not on my computer. Is it down?
No. The two devices are getting different DNS answers or one of them has a cached page. Clear the browser cache on the computer, or wait for its DNS to catch up. If it stays broken for everyone else, run the free check.
How long does a fix take?
Most site-down jobs are done within hours once we have access; the promise is same day. The slow part is usually getting access, which is why the job page walks you through it step by step.
Can you fix a site that is not WordPress?
Yes. Site-down is one of the fixes that covers any platform, as long as we can get server access.