Work through it in order instead of trying everything at once. First, confirm it's broken for everyone, not just you (try your phone on mobile data). Second, write down exactly what you see and when it started. Third, ask what changed just before: an update, a plugin, a deploy, a setting, a payment that failed. Undoing that change fixes most emergencies. If nothing changed, check the domain, then the hosting, then the logs, then contact your host with what you wrote down.
What's the problem
Your website is down, showing an error, or a key part has stopped working, and you need it back now.
Why it happens
Almost every emergency is one of:
- A recent change: an update, a new plugin or app, a code deploy, an edited setting.
- The hosting: the server is down, overloaded, out of space, or the account is suspended (often a failed payment).
- The domain: it expired, or its DNS changed.
- An outside service: a payment provider, email service or platform you depend on is having an outage.
- An attack or a flood of bots.
How to fix it
- Confirm it's broken for everyone. See is my website down.
- Write down the exact error, a screenshot, and the time it started.
- Undo the last change if there was one: roll back the deploy, disable the plugin, restore the setting.
- Check the domain hasn't expired and still points at your host.
- Check your hosting dashboard and status page for outages, suspensions, or resource limits.
- Check the logs, or ask whoever can, for errors at the time it started.
- Contact your host or developer with the error, the time, and what changed. That turns hours of back-and-forth into minutes.
- Afterwards, set up monitoring and backups, so next time you hear first and can roll back fast.
What Preventionlabs checks
One click runs the full report on your domain. For this problem it shows whether your site loads, how fast, and where its redirects go; uptime checked every 5 minutes, with an email when the site goes down and when it is back; up to 50 pages from your sitemap, listing any that fail or are slow, plus broken links on them; your DNS: nameservers, addresses, DNSSEC, and records pointing at services that no longer exist; your domain's registration and expiry date. With Cloudflare connected, it also shows which pages returned server errors (5xx) to visitors, and when; recent deploys and account changes, with their times.
Run your free reportYour first report is free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains. Read-only: it never changes anything.
Sources
- Cloudflare: Cloudflare 5xx errorsofficial docs
When troubleshooting most 5XX errors, the correct course of action is to first contact your hosting provider or site administrator to troubleshoot and gather data.
- SiteGround: What to do when my site is down?knowledge base
In case you are not able to access your website and it seems to be down, you can follow the suggested steps to troubleshoot the issue.