Your website is down and you have no idea why. Here is a plain English explanation of the most common reasons websites stop working, and what you can do about each one.
Think of your website like a restaurant. The building is your hosting server. The menu is your code and content. The kitchen is your database. The address on Google Maps is your domain name.
When any one of these things stops working, your restaurant cannot serve customers. Same with your website. Let us walk through each thing that can go wrong.
This is the most common reason websites go down. Your website lives on a computer called a server, usually owned by a hosting company like GoDaddy, Bluehost, SiteGround, or AWS.
Sometimes that server runs out of memory, gets overwhelmed with traffic, or simply crashes. When it does, every website on that server goes down, including yours.
How to tell: You see a "500 Internal Server Error" or a blank white page. Sometimes you see "Service Unavailable."
What to do: Contact your hosting company first. If they say everything is fine on their end, the problem is likely with your website code or configuration. That is where we come in.
Your domain name (like yourbusiness.com) needs to be renewed every year. If your credit card on file expired or the renewal emails went to spam, your domain can lapse.
DNS settings are like the address book that tells visitors where your website server is located. If someone changed these settings (or your hosting company changed your server IP), visitors cannot find your site.
How to tell: You see "This site can not be reached" or "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN" in your browser.
What to do: Check if your domain is still active at your registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, etc.). If the domain is active, the DNS settings may need to be updated.
SSL certificates are what make the padlock icon appear in your browser. They encrypt the connection between your visitors and your website.
When an SSL certificate expires, browsers do not just show a warning. They actively block visitors from reaching your site with a scary "Your connection is not private" message. Most people will immediately leave.
How to tell: You see "Your connection is not private" or "NET::ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID" in the browser.
What to do: SSL certificates need to be renewed. Most hosting companies offer free SSL through Let us Encrypt, but auto-renewal sometimes fails. Your hosting company or we can renew it quickly.
If you use WordPress (and about 70-80% of website owners do), plugins and themes get updates regularly. Most updates go fine. But sometimes an update conflicts with another plugin, your theme, or your version of PHP.
When this happens, you might see the dreaded "White Screen of Death" where your site shows nothing but a blank white page. Or you might see an error message about a specific file or function.
How to tell: Your site broke right after you (or WordPress auto-update) updated a plugin or theme.
What to do: Do not try to fix this by deleting plugins at random. That can make things worse. The fix usually involves accessing your site files through your hosting panel and disabling the problematic plugin or reverting the update.
Hacked websites are more common than most people think. Hackers target WordPress sites especially because they are so popular. They exploit outdated plugins, weak passwords, and known vulnerabilities.
A hacked site might redirect all visitors to a spam website, show pharmaceutical ads, send spam emails from your domain, or be completely taken down by the attacker.
How to tell: You see content you did not create, your site redirects somewhere else, Google shows a "This site may be hacked" warning, or your hosting company sent you a malware notification.
What to do: Do not try to clean it yourself. Malware often hides in multiple places and incomplete removal means it comes right back. Professional malware cleanup is the fastest and safest option.
Your website stores all its content (pages, posts, products, user accounts) in a database. If the database server goes down or the connection between your website and the database breaks, nothing on your site can load.
This is especially common on WordPress sites, which depend heavily on a MySQL database.
How to tell: You see "Error establishing a database connection" on your site.
What to do: This could be a hosting issue (the database server is down), a configuration issue (wrong database credentials in your settings file), or a corrupted database. Each requires a different fix.
Good news: your marketing campaign or social media post went viral. Bad news: your hosting plan cannot handle the traffic.
Most shared hosting plans are designed for a few hundred to a few thousand visitors per day. When you suddenly get 10x that, the server runs out of resources and starts returning errors or crashing completely.
How to tell: Your site went down during or right after a traffic spike (you can see this in your analytics). You might see "503 Service Unavailable" errors.
What to do: Contact your hosting company about upgrading your plan. For a quick fix, caching plugins and a CDN (Content Delivery Network) can dramatically reduce server load.
First, do not panic. Most website issues look scary but have straightforward fixes.
Second, do not start changing settings, deleting files, or disabling plugins at random. This is how a fixable problem becomes a disaster.
Third, check if the problem is on your end. Try visiting your site from a different device or ask a friend to try. Clear your browser cache. If your site works for others but not for you, the problem is local.
Fourth, if your site is truly down for everyone, you have two options: diagnose it yourself (if you are technically comfortable) or get professional help.
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With Instant Nerds, most downtime fixes cost $49-$149 flat rate. You get a quote before we start, and you only pay if we fix it.
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Regular maintenance helps a lot. Keep your plugins, themes, and CMS updated. Use a reliable hosting provider. Set up uptime monitoring so you know immediately when your site goes down. And always keep backups.
You can check using our free Is My Site Down? tool. It checks your website from our servers so you can see if the problem is global or just on your end.