Is my website down? How to check

Also searched as: how to check if website is working

Updated 9 October 2026

Short answer

Open the site on your phone using mobile data, not Wi-Fi. If it loads, the site is up and the problem is your own connection, browser or computer. If it fails there too, it's down for everyone, and the error you see tells you why. A healthy page answers with status code 200. Anything in the 500s means the server side failed.

What's the problem

The site isn't loading for you, and you don't know if it's your internet, your computer, or the website itself. Or a customer has told you it's down and you can't tell whether they're right.

Why it happens

A website can look down for three very different reasons:

  • It's down for everyone. The server, hosting or domain has a problem.
  • It's down for some people. A firewall rule, a country block, a DNS change that hasn't reached everyone yet, or one failing server among several.
  • It's only you. Your Wi-Fi, a VPN, an office firewall, a browser extension, or an old cached copy of the page.

How to fix it

  1. Try a different network. Phone on mobile data is the quickest test.
  2. Try a private browser window. That rules out extensions, cookies and cached pages.
  3. Check the status code. In Chrome, open Developer Tools (F12), go to the Network tab and reload. The first row shows the status: 200 is fine, 4xx means the request was refused or the page is missing, 5xx means the server failed.
  4. Check the domain resolves. If the browser says the address can't be found, the domain or its DNS is the problem. See DNS not resolving.
  5. Check from outside. Ask someone in another city or country to try, or use an online "is it down" checker.
  6. Set up monitoring. So next time you know when it goes down, and exactly when it started.

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; your DNS: nameservers, addresses, DNSSEC, and records pointing at services that no longer exist; your domain's registration and expiry date.

Run your free report

Your first report is free, no card needed. Then A$50 a month, up to 10 domains. Read-only: it never changes anything.

Sources

  1. MDN Web Docs: HTTP response status codesreferenceHTTP response status codes indicate whether a specific HTTP request has been successfully completed.

Related

Why is my website down? Check whether it's down for everyone, read the error on the page, then work through domain, hosting and recent changes. Most outages trace back to one of those. DNS not resolving: NXDOMAIN NXDOMAIN means DNS says the name doesn't exist at all. Usually a typo, an expired domain, a missing record for that subdomain, or broken nameservers. Why is my website slow? Find out which part is slow: the server producing the page, or the browser loading heavy files. Measure first, then fix the slowest part. My website is broken. What do I do? Stay calm and work in order: confirm it's broken for everyone, write down the exact error and time, undo the last change, then check domain, hosting and logs.
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