Why Is My Website Down? How to Diagnose It in 10 Minutes
Your site won’t load and you don’t know if it’s your hosting, your DNS, a broken plugin, or just your phone playing up. That uncertainty is the annoying part. Before you call anyone or start panicking about lost sales, there is a short sequence of checks that will tell you, in about ten minutes, roughly where the fault sits.
Most “website down” reports turn out to be one of a handful of causes, and each one has a different fix. This walks through them in the order that finds the answer fastest, and it sits alongside the rest of GoodHost’s security and backups guides if you want the wider picture once your site is back up.
Short answer: Check the site from another device or network first. If it loads elsewhere, the problem is local to you, not the server. If it’s down everywhere, check for a status page or outage notice, then look at whether you or a plugin changed anything recently before assuming the host is at fault.
Is the site actually down, or is it just you?
Load the site from your phone on mobile data, not your home wifi, or ask a colleague on a different network to check it. If it loads fine for them, the fault is local: your router, your ISP, a DNS cache on your own device, or a browser extension blocking the page.
A free tool like a “down for everyone or just me” checker will ping the site from several locations at once and tell you in seconds whether it’s a global outage or a you problem. This single step rules out a huge chunk of false alarms and stops you troubleshooting the wrong thing.
If it’s genuinely down everywhere, try clearing your own DNS cache anyway before moving on, since it costs nothing and occasionally explains an isolated case that looked global.
Could it be a DNS problem rather than the hosting itself?
DNS problems look exactly like the site being down, but the server is often running fine. This happens after a domain renewal lapses, a nameserver change, or an incorrectly edited DNS record, and it can affect some visitors before others depending on what their resolver has cached.
Check that the domain hasn’t expired. This is the most common cause and the easiest to miss, because the site can keep working for existing visitors with a cached record right up until it doesn’t. Then check whether the nameservers or the A record point where you expect.
- Domain expiry date, checked directly through the registrar, not just the site loading
- Nameservers pointing at the correct host
- A record or CNAME pointing at the correct server IP
- No recent DNS edits you or a developer made in the last 48 hours
If you changed a DNS record recently, some visitors may still see the old version until the TTL on that record expires at their resolver. That’s a caching quirk, not a fault, and it resolves on its own.
Is it a hosting or server issue?
If DNS checks out and the site is confirmed down from multiple networks, the fault sits with hosting: the server, an account suspension, a resource limit, or an expired hosting plan. Log in to your hosting control panel directly by IP or a temporary URL if the domain itself won’t resolve, and check for a suspension notice or resource alert.
On shared hosting, an account can be temporarily suspended for exceeding resource limits, most often CPU or entry processes, usually triggered by a traffic spike, a runaway script, or a brute-force login attempt hammering the server. GoodHost’s WordPress hosting publishes the actual container limits per plan (vCPU, RAM, entry processes, IO and IOPS) rather than selling on a vague “visits per month” figure, which makes it easier to see whether a plan is genuinely undersized rather than guessing.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Where to check first |
|---|---|---|
| Down on your device only | Local network, DNS cache, or extension | Different device or mobile data |
| Down everywhere, domain looks odd | Expired domain or DNS misconfiguration | Registrar account, nameserver records |
| Down everywhere, domain is fine | Server or hosting account issue | Hosting control panel or support ticket |
| Some pages work, others error | Plugin, theme, or code issue | Recent changes, error logs |
Did a plugin, theme or update break something?
If the homepage shows a white screen or a PHP error rather than a connection failure, that’s usually a software problem, not a hosting outage. WordPress sites in particular go down after a plugin or theme update conflicts with something else on the site, and it tends to happen right after you or someone with access made a change.
This looks different from being hacked, though the symptoms can seem similar. If you suspect unauthorised access rather than a simple update conflict, see what to do in the first hour after a hack instead, since the steps are not the same.
Think back over the last hour: did anyone update a plugin, install a new one, or change a theme setting? If so, that’s the first suspect. You can often get the site back by renaming the suspect plugin’s folder via FTP or File Manager, which forces WordPress to disable it without needing to log in to wp-admin.
If you can still reach wp-admin, WordPress’s own health check under Tools tells you plainly whether a critical error is active and roughly where it originated.
What should you do while it’s down?
Work through the checks in order rather than jumping between them, and don’t make several changes at once while troubleshooting, because it becomes impossible to tell afterwards which one actually fixed it. Change one thing, check the result, then move to the next before trying anything else.
- Confirm whether it’s local to you or genuinely down (see above)
- Check domain expiry and DNS records
- Check the hosting control panel for suspension or resource alerts
- Check for a recent plugin, theme or code change
- If none of that explains it, contact your host with specifics: when it started, what you’ve already checked, and any error message on screen
Having those specifics ready before you contact GoodHost’s support team saves a full back-and-forth, since the first thing any support technician asks is exactly what you’ve already ruled out.
How can you avoid this happening again?
You can’t eliminate outages entirely, since hardware, networks and third-party services all fail occasionally, but you can shrink both how often it happens and how long it takes you to notice. An uptime monitor that emails or texts you the moment the site stops responding means you hear about it from a robot instead of a customer.
Keeping backups current also matters here, because if the cause turns out to be a bad update or a hack rather than a simple outage, the fastest fix is often restoring from a backup rather than debugging line by line under pressure. It’s worth knowing your host’s daily backup schedule before you need it, not while the site is down.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my website say “can’t reach this page” but works on my phone?
That’s almost always a local issue: a DNS cache on your computer, a browser extension, or your home router, not the server itself. Working on mobile data on your phone confirms the server is fine and the fault is on your end.
How long can a website be down before it affects Google rankings?
A short outage of minutes to a few hours rarely has a lasting effect. Extended or repeated downtime can affect how often search engines crawl the site, since crawlers slow down on domains that error out consistently.
Can a website go down without the owner doing anything wrong?
Yes. Domain renewal failures, upstream network issues, DDoS attempts against the server, and third-party service outages can all take a site down with no error on the owner’s part.
What does “server not found” mean specifically?
It usually means DNS couldn’t resolve the domain to an IP address at all, which points to an expired domain, incorrect nameservers, or a DNS record that’s missing or wrong, rather than the server itself failing.
Should I panic if my site is down for five minutes?
No. Brief blips happen across the internet regularly and often resolve themselves. Start troubleshooting properly if it’s still down after checking from a second device and a few minutes have passed.
If a first look through the steps above hasn’t pinned it down, write up what you’ve already ruled out and open a ticket with GoodHost’s support team, who can pick up from where you left off rather than starting the whole diagnosis over again.