A website outage at the wrong moment can cost a small business a day of enquiries, a string of broken email replies, and a lasting hit to customer trust. The frustrating part is that most owners discover the problem from a passing customer or a missed booking, then panic on the phone to a host who needs ten different bits of information before they can help.
This website down checklist walks through the same steps a hosting engineer would take, in the order that solves the problem fastest. Run through it before you raise a ticket and you will either find the cause yourself or arrive at support with the right answers ready.
It applies whether you run a WordPress site on shared hosting, a brochure site on a UK reseller plan, or a small e-commerce shop. The principles do not change.
What’s in This Post
- First, check if the site is down for everyone
- Check your domain has not expired
- Check DNS records
- Check hosting and server status
- Check for SSL certificate issues
- Check recent WordPress and plugin changes
- Check whether email is affected too
- What to tell your web host
- How to prevent it happening again
- When to move to a more reliable host
- Final Thoughts
First, check if the site is down for everyone
Before you do anything else, find out whether the problem is global or just on your machine. A surprising number of “the site is down” calls turn out to be a flat WiFi connection, a corporate firewall, or a stale browser cache.
Open the site on your phone with WiFi turned off, so it loads over mobile data. If it works there, the issue lies with your local network rather than the site. If it fails on mobile data too, run the URL through a service like downforeveryoneorjustme.com or isitdownrightnow.com.
Also try a private or incognito window. Browser extensions, an old service worker, or a bad cookie can break a single browser while the site itself runs fine. Two minutes of testing here saves a lot of wasted phone calls.
Check your domain has not expired
Expired domains cause more outages than people expect. The renewal email lands in a long-forgotten inbox, the card on file fails, and one morning the site simply stops resolving. Visitors see a registrar parking page or a blunt “this site can’t be reached” error.
Run a free WHOIS lookup on our own Webfort WHOIS tool. Look at the expiry date. If it has passed, log into your registrar and renew immediately. Most registrars hold the domain in a redemption period for 30 days, so you usually have a window, but the longer you leave it the more it costs to recover.
While you are there, check the contact email on the WHOIS record is one you actually monitor. A renewal notice that lands in a former employee’s inbox is the same as no notice at all.
Check DNS records
DNS turns your domain name into the IP address of your server. If the records are wrong, the domain points nowhere and the site appears to be down even though the server itself is healthy.
Common DNS problems include:
- A record missing or pointing to an old server. Often happens after a host migration that was not finished cleanly.
- Nameservers changed without warning. Sometimes a registrar reset, sometimes a well-meaning developer who has forgotten to tell you.
- CNAME loop or typo. A small character error breaks resolution entirely.
Use a public checker like dnschecker.org to see what your domain currently resolves to from different parts of the world. Compare that to what your hosting control panel says it should be. If the two do not match, you have found your problem.
Check hosting and server status
If DNS looks correct, the next layer to check is the host itself. Log in to your hosting control panel. If the panel will not load either, that is a strong signal that the host is having a wider issue.
Most reputable hosts run a public status page. Webfort, for example, posts incident updates on our system status page so customers do not need to chase support to find out whether an issue is known. Check the status page first. If a network or storage incident is already being worked on, you have your answer and an estimated time to resolution.
If the host’s status page shows everything is healthy but your site still will not load, the issue is more likely with your account specifically. That could mean disk full, suspended account, exhausted PHP workers, or a process that has crashed. A good host will tell you which of these applies in their first reply.
Check for SSL certificate issues
An expired or misconfigured SSL certificate does not always take a site offline, but it shows visitors a scary red browser warning that effectively keeps them out. Many users will not click past it, even if the site itself is technically running.
Open the site in a browser and click the padlock icon in the address bar. Look at the certificate expiry date. If the certificate has expired, your control panel should let you reissue a free Let’s Encrypt or AutoSSL certificate within minutes. If reissue keeps failing, there is usually a DNS or domain-validation reason, and we have a full walkthrough in our guide to fixing AutoSSL issues in cPanel.
Mixed-content errors are a related problem. The site loads over HTTPS but pulls in an image or script over plain HTTP, and modern browsers block the page or strip the padlock. The fix is usually to update the affected URL inside WordPress or your CMS.
Check recent WordPress and plugin changes
If your site runs on WordPress and was working an hour ago, the most likely culprit is a recent change. A plugin update, a theme update, or a new plugin you just installed can take the site down with a white screen or a fatal error.
Ask yourself, in this order:
- Did anyone update plugins or themes today?
- Did auto-updates run overnight? Check the WordPress dashboard once you regain access.
- Was a new plugin activated recently?
- Did anyone edit theme files directly?
If you cannot reach the dashboard, you can still recover the site over FTP or your control panel’s file manager. Rename the plugins folder to plugins-off to deactivate everything in one move, then refresh the site. If it loads, you have isolated the problem to a plugin and can re-enable them one at a time. Slower, more methodical recovery beats panicked guessing.
For prevention, our guide on securing your WordPress site covers the staging and backup steps that keep updates from turning into outages.
Check whether email is affected too
If your domain email has stopped working at the same time as the website, the picture changes. The most common cause of both failing together is a domain or DNS issue, because the same records that point your website also point your mail.
Try sending and receiving a test message from a domain account. If outgoing mail is bouncing with “host not found” errors or incoming messages are not arriving, check the MX records alongside your A records. A common pattern is that the website resolves but mail does not, which often means the MX records were lost during a migration.
If only the website is affected and email still flows normally, you can usually rule out a domain-level outage and focus on the hosting account itself. If both are dead, the diagnosis is faster: start with WHOIS and DNS.
What to tell your web host
When you raise a support ticket, the speed of the resolution depends almost entirely on the quality of the information in your first message. A good host can act on a clear report in minutes. A vague “my site is down” will trigger a round of questions that costs you another 30 minutes.
Include all of the following:
- The full domain, including any subdomains affected.
- The exact error message you see, ideally with a screenshot.
- What you were doing when it broke (an update, a deploy, nothing).
- Whether the site is down for everyone or only for you.
- Any recent changes to the site, plugins, DNS, or domain.
- Whether email is affected.
If you have already worked through this checklist, say so. Tell the host you have confirmed the domain is not expired, DNS resolves to the correct IP, SSL is valid, and the issue is global. That single sentence saves the engineer time and pushes your ticket past the obvious questions.
How to prevent it happening again
Most outages are preventable. The same handful of safeguards covers the majority of small-business sites.
- Turn on uptime monitoring. A free monitor on a service like UptimeRobot will email or text you the moment the site stops responding, so you find out before your customers do.
- Lock domain auto-renewal to a card you actually use. And put the renewal date in a calendar a month ahead.
- Take regular backups. Daily, off-server, and tested at least once. A backup you have never restored is not really a backup.
- Use staging for plugin updates. Test changes on a copy of the site before they touch production.
- Keep WordPress, PHP, and the database engine current. Old versions are both slower and far more likely to fail.
None of these take more than an afternoon to set up. Together they remove four of the five most common reasons a small-business site goes down.
When to move to a more reliable host
One unexpected outage in two years is normal. Three in six months is a pattern. If your site keeps going down for reasons your host cannot or will not explain, the problem is the host, not your site.
Warning signs to take seriously:
- Vague or copy-paste responses to support tickets.
- No published status page, or a status page that is always green even during obvious incidents.
- Slow first-byte times that get worse during UK working hours, suggesting an oversold server.
- Repeated “exhausted PHP workers” or “MySQL gone away” errors despite a small site.
- Renewal prices that quietly double while service quality drops.
If two or more of those apply, it is worth pricing a move. We compare what a reliable UK plan should actually cost in how much web hosting costs in 2026, and the move itself is far less painful than most owners expect — our free website transfer tool handles the migration for you.
Final Thoughts
An outage feels like a crisis at the time, but most are caused by one of six predictable problems: a local network glitch, an expired domain, broken DNS, a host issue, an SSL certificate, or a recent WordPress change. Working through this checklist in order finds the cause within fifteen minutes for the great majority of small-business sites.
Print it, save it, or stash it in the same folder as your hosting login. The next time the site stops responding you will move from panic to diagnosis far faster, and the conversation with your host will be a short one.
If your hosting is the recurring issue, talk to us. Webfort runs a UK-based, monitored platform with a published status page, and we move sites across at no charge. Our team picks up the phone in working hours, and the support tickets get answered by someone who can actually fix the problem.