Is my website down, or is it just me?

Find out in two minutes

• Try your phone with Wi-Fi off. That takes your office network, your browser and your computer out of the picture.
• Try a private window on your computer, in case your browser is showing you something old.
• Use the free check on our home page. It asks from outside your network.

If it opens everywhere except your own network, the site is fine for customers. Your connection or VPN may be at fault, or the site’s firewall may have blocked your address, which can happen after a few wrong passwords.

What the error is telling you

• “Server not found” or a DNS error. The name no longer leads anywhere. Check first that your domain has not expired, then whether its settings were changed.
• A parking or “domain for sale” page. The domain has probably expired. Contact the company you bought it from today: after a grace period it can be sold to someone else.
• “Your connection is not private”. The site is running, but the HTTPS certificate has expired or does not match, and most visitors will turn back. Ask your host to renew it.
• It took too long to respond. The server is off or overloaded, or a firewall is ignoring you.
• 403 Forbidden. The server is refusing you, often a firewall or permissions setting. Real visitors may be fine, so try another network before you worry.
• 404 Not Found. The server is working but that page is gone. If it is your home page, something has moved or been deleted.
• 500 Internal Server Error, or “error establishing a database connection”. The site’s own software is failing, very often straight after an update.
• 502, 503 or 504. The server behind the site is overloaded, under maintenance or not answering. These sometimes pass on their own within minutes.

Who to contact, and what to tell them

Go to your web host or whoever looks after the site, and check your host’s status page for a known outage. You will get a faster answer if you send:

• the exact address and the exact error, with a screenshot;
• when it started, and whether it fails on your phone too;
• anything that changed just before: an update, a new plugin, a payment that failed.

How to hear about it first

Customers rarely tell you a site is down. They go elsewhere. Quivermark checks your site every five minutes on every paid plan. Before it tells you the site is down, it tries again and takes a second look from another network, so one bad moment does not set off an alarm. The email says in plain words what happened and what to do, with a message you can forward to whoever looks after the site.

A site can also be up and still not working. Your contact form can fail without any error showing.

Also useful

• Contact form not sending emails? How to find out why
• Website not showing on Google? What to check
• UptimeRobot alternative: when an up-check is not enough