What to Do When Your Website Breaks
Knowing what to do when your website breaks is worth more at six in the evening than at any other time.
It is six in the evening. A customer messages to say your site will not open, and when you check, they are right.
Knowing what to do when your website breaks matters most in the first ten minutes, because almost every expensive mistake happens there. People start changing settings, deleting things, or ringing the wrong person entirely.
Work through this in order instead.
Rule One: Change Nothing Yet
The instinct is to fix something immediately. Resist it for ten minutes.
Changing DNS settings, deleting files, or reinstalling anything before you know what failed frequently turns a small problem into an unrecoverable one. Worse, it destroys the evidence somebody else would need to diagnose it.
Diagnose first, act second.
Identify Which Kind of Broken
What to do when your website breaks depends entirely on the failure type, and there are five.
Completely unreachable. The browser cannot connect at all.
Loading but wrong. Pages appear broken, unstyled, or partially rendered.
A security warning appears in red before the site loads.
Content has changed without anybody changing it, or unfamiliar pages appear.
The site works but email does not, which usually points at the domain rather than the site.
Each of these has a different cause and a different person to call.
The Ten Minute Triage
Minute one. Check whether it is only you. Ask somebody else to open the site, or try mobile data instead of your wifi.
Minute two. Try the address with and without www, and try it in a private browser window.
Minute three. Check whether your domain has expired. This is the most common cause of a site vanishing entirely, and our post on what to do when a domain has expired covers the recovery.
Minute four. Check your email on the same domain. Where email is also dead, the problem is almost certainly domain or DNS rather than the website.
Minute five. Log into your hosting account and check for a suspension notice, an unpaid invoice, or a resource warning.
Minutes six to ten. Look for a security warning, unfamiliar pages, or unexpected redirects. Our post on signs your website has been hacked lists what to look for.
By minute ten you usually know which category you are in.
Who to Call, in Order
Your hosting provider, where the site is unreachable, slow, or suspended. Most Kenyan hosts run support channels that respond faster than people expect.
Your registrar, where the domain has expired or DNS is misconfigured.
Your developer or agency, where the site loads but behaves incorrectly.
A security specialist, where you suspect a compromise and have no clean backup.
Calling the wrong one first costs hours. Establishing the category before you dial is the whole point of the triage.
What to Have Ready Before It Happens
Deciding what to do when your website breaks is easier with an emergency card prepared now, while nothing is wrong. Keep it somewhere accessible that does not depend on your website or your work email.
It should list your registrar and login, your hosting provider and login, your website admin login, where backups are stored and how to reach them, your developer’s contact details, and your domain and hosting renewal dates.
Most of the panic in an outage comes from not knowing who hosts the site. That question should never take an hour to answer.
Prevention Costs Less Than Recovery
Most of what to do when your website breaks can be avoided entirely.
Automatic backups, stored somewhere other than the same server. A backup on the machine that failed is not a backup.
Automatic renewal on the domain and hosting, with reminders going to an address somebody actually reads.
Updates applied regularly, since most compromises exploit known weaknesses in outdated software.
Uptime monitoring, which tells you before a customer does.
Documented access, so more than one person can act. Our post on who should have website admin access covers the arrangement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What to do when your website breaks and you have no developer? Start with the triage above, then contact your host. Hosting support resolves a large share of outages without anybody else being involved.
How long should recovery take? A hosting issue often resolves in hours. An expired domain depends on how far into the recovery period you are. A compromise with a clean backup takes hours; without one, considerably longer.
Will I lose my Google rankings? Short outages rarely cause lasting damage. Extended downtime, or a security warning left unaddressed, does.
Should I tell customers? A short message on social channels prevents the assumption that you have closed.
Is it worth paying for monitoring? Yes. Discovering an outage from a customer is more expensive than any monitoring service.
Can I prevent this entirely? No, though backups, updates, and automatic renewals prevent most of it.
Diagnose, Then Act
What to do when your website breaks comes down to resisting the first instinct, spending ten minutes establishing the category, and calling the right person once rather than three people in sequence.
At Africa Web Experts we hand over every login on launch day and keep documented backups, so an emergency starts with information rather than a search. From KES 65,000, live in seventy two hours.
