What Happens If My Website Goes Down?

What it costs while it's down

Less than owners fear, usually — an hour offline on a Tuesday isn't a disaster. What does hurt is being down for days without noticing, or a form that quietly stops delivering while the site looks perfectly fine. That's the outage you find out about when a customer says they wrote weeks ago.

First: is it actually down?

Check on mobile data, not your office wifi, and in a private browsing window. Ask someone elsewhere to try it. Local network issues, your own browser cache, and a device holding an old address all look exactly like an outage.

Then work through the four causes

• •Domain: has it expired, or is renewal failing? This is the most common cause and the quickest to check.
• •DNS: did someone change settings recently? Changes take time to spread and can break email too.
• •Hosting or platform: is the bill paid and is the provider reporting an incident? Check their status page.
• •The site itself: did an update, plugin, or edit break it? Usually the cause when it failed right after a change.

See what happens if my domain expires and domain, hosting and website explained.

Contact the right people

If someone maintains your site, message them with specifics: what you see, on which device, when it started, and what changed recently. If it's hosting, the provider's support is faster than guessing. Don't start changing DNS records hoping something helps — that turns a short outage into a long one.

Reduce the damage in advance

• •Free uptime monitoring that emails you when the site stops responding.
• •Form submissions stored somewhere as well as emailed.
• •A Google Business Profile with your phone number, so you're reachable regardless.
• •Your phone number visible in your social profiles.
• •Knowing who to call, before you need to.

See do I need a Google Business Profile and do I need backups.