It’s Monday morning and you’re working your way through email messages when you see the alert message in your Important folder.
We noticed that your site www.mysite.com was down. During our last check at 10:24pm, we noticed that your site was down.
Oh no.
What happened to your site? You let out a long sigh, wondering how long it’s going to take to figure out what caused your website to crash.
In this article, I’ll share three quick ways to help you solve what happened to your website and get your site back up in no time.
- Confirm Your Site Is Down
Visit your website to verify it’s down. When you check your site, make sure you clear thecache in your browser.
Contact a friend to ask if they can view your site. Is the site displaying? Great!
If not, check the site with an alternative browser. If you regularly use Chrome, try Firefox. Or Internet Explorer or Safari.
If the site still doesn’t display, check your website with an alternative connection.
For example, if your business connection is Comcast, but you use ATT for your smartphone, check to see if your website displays in both.
If your site displays for one connection, and not the other, you can assume there’s an issue with your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or wireless carrier.
Visit DownDetector to find out if any issues have been reported for your carrier or ISP. If no issues have been reported, contact your ISP or wireless carrier to find out if there are issues with your connection.
One last step: visit Down for Everyone or Just Me to confirm your site is down. If your site still isn’t displaying, move on to step 2.
- Contact your web host
Despite all the claims to be up 99.9999% of the time, web servers can go down. It’s possible there was a server issue that is being worked on by your web host.
Contact your web host customer support about your site being down. Let them know the time you received your alert message, and ask if there were any issues with the server.
Ask your web host support to check your logs for anything that looks suspicious. They can tell you if they notice anything unusual, and offer you suggestions for next steps to take.
This could mean you need to contact your developer/designer about your site.
If the web host confirms everything looks good on their end, move on to step 3.
- Confirm your domain registration is paid
The most common reason my clients’ sites go down: forgetting to pay their domain name registration.
If your domain name registration hasn’t been paid, pay it online and your site will be back up quickly.
Domain names are often paid annually, but you can set up automatic renewal or pay several years in advance.
One thing to keep in mind: use a current email address for your domain name registrar. Many of my clients register their domain name for several years.
If their email address changes during that time, they may not have the message forwarded to their new email address.
Suggestion: schedule a notification message to be sent to yourself at the end of each year to confirm your email address for your domain name registrar.
Summary
The three quick tips I’ve offered will hopefully resolve the issue with your site being down. They are the beginning steps to troubleshoot a crashed site.
However, there are a number of reasons a website goes down. If you’ve recently changed applications used on the site, it’s possible one of them caused a conflict.
For example, if you’re using WordPress on your site, and added a new plugin, it’s possible the new plugin caused issues. Or there could be an issue with security on your site.
If you need further help with getting your site back up, contact your designer or developer for help.
Don’t have a designer or developer to contact? Contact me for help in troubleshooting your website.
