Your Website Is Down: The First Five Checks
Your website is down, and the instinct is to call somebody immediately. Spend five minutes establishing what actually failed first.
When a website is down there are only a handful of realistic causes, and four of the five checks below cost nothing. Working through them in order will usually tell you which conversation to have next.
Check One: Is It Actually Down?
Sometimes a website is down only for you, and nobody else notices anything.
Ask somebody in another location to open it. Alternatively switch your phone to mobile data instead of wifi and try again. Try a private browser window, since a cached version or an old cookie occasionally causes a local failure.
Where it loads for others, the problem sits with your network, your device, or your browser rather than your site.
Check Two: Has the Domain Expired?
This is the most common single cause of a site disappearing completely, and it catches businesses every year.
Run a public WHOIS lookup on your domain name and read the expiry date. Where the domain has lapsed, the site and every email address on it stop working simultaneously, which is a useful diagnostic in itself.
Our post on what to do when a domain has expired covers the recovery windows, which get more expensive the longer you wait.
Check Three: Is Email Also Dead?
Send yourself a message at your business address, or try sending one from it.
Where email fails alongside the site, the fault almost certainly lies with the domain or the DNS settings rather than the website itself. Where email works fine and only the site is unreachable, the problem is more likely hosting or the site software.
Two minutes here saves you calling the wrong provider.
Check Four: What Does Your Host Say?
Log into your hosting control panel.
Look for a suspension notice, an unpaid invoice, a resource limit warning, or a service status announcement. Hosting accounts get suspended for non payment surprisingly often, and the notification frequently goes to an email address nobody monitors.
Many Kenyan hosts also publish a status page or post about incidents on social channels. Check before assuming the fault is yours.
Check Five: What Error Are You Seeing?
When a website is down the error message matters, so read it rather than closing it.
Cannot connect, or server not found, usually points at domain or DNS.
Error 500 points at the site software, frequently after an update.
Error 403 suggests permissions or a security block.
A security warning in red means something quite different, and our post on what to do when Google flags your site as unsafe covers it.
An expired certificate warning means SSL has lapsed, which most hosts can renew quickly.
Photograph the error before anybody starts changing things.
Now Call the Right Person
Domain or DNS problems go to your registrar. Suspensions, server errors, and slow responses go to your host. Site behaviour and software errors go to your developer.
Nothing wastes more time in an outage than explaining the situation to somebody who cannot fix it.
While You Wait
Post a short note on your social channels so customers know you are trading. Where you take enquiries through the site, publish a phone number or WhatsApp contact in the meantime.
Resist the urge to change DNS settings or reinstall anything while support is investigating. Our guide to what to do when your website breaks covers the wider triage.
Frequently Asked Questions
My website is down but my email works. What does that mean? Usually a hosting or site software problem rather than a domain issue.
How long do outages normally last? Hosting faults are frequently resolved within hours. Expired domains and compromises take longer.
Will an outage hurt my search rankings? Brief downtime rarely causes lasting damage. Days of it can.
Can I check my site from outside Kenya? Yes, several free services test availability from multiple locations, which helps confirm whether the problem is local.
Should I have a backup? Always, stored somewhere other than the same server.
How do I get warned earlier? Uptime monitoring will tell you before a customer does.
Five Minutes Before You Dial
A website is down for a small number of reasons, and five checks separate them. Establish the cause, then contact the one provider who can fix it.
At Africa Web Experts we hand over hosting and registrar access on launch day, so these checks take minutes rather than days. From KES 65,000, live in seventy two hours.
