Guides

My website is down: how to fix it in the first hour

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Published October 27, 2026 · About a 6-minute read

When a small business website goes down, the error on the screen usually tells you the cause, and the cause tells you who to call. Most outages come down to a handful of things: an expired domain or certificate, an unpaid hosting bill, a settings change, a bad update, or a hack. This guide walks through the first hour, in order.

First, check it’s really down

Before you call anyone, spend five minutes ruling out your own connection:

• Try your phone on mobile data, with Wi-Fi switched off. If it loads there, the problem may be your office network, not your website.
• Use a free “is it down?” checker, such as downforeveryoneorjustme.com. It tries your site from somewhere else and tells you whether it’s down for everyone.
• Take a screenshot of the error. The exact wording matters, and whoever fixes it will ask for it.

Read the error: it usually points to the cause

Two causes worth knowing about

An expired domain. For .com and similar domains, ICANN’s rules require the company you registered with to send renewal reminders about a month and a week before the domain expires. Those reminders go to the email address on the registration, which is often an old one, or a former web designer’s. Once the domain expires, the website stops working, and so does any email on that domain. You can usually still renew it for a while afterwards, so call straight away (ICANN’s expired domain policy).

An expired certificate. Certificates now have to be renewed more often than they used to. Since March 2026 the longest a certificate can last is 200 days, falling to 100 days in March 2027 and 47 days in 2029, under rules agreed by the browser makers and the companies that issue certificates. Most hosts renew them automatically. When that quietly fails, visitors see a security warning and most of them leave.

Who to call, and what to ask

1. Your web host. “Is my server up? Is my account active and paid? Has anything changed in the last 48 hours?” Many hosts also have a status page that shows outages.
2. Whoever your domain is registered with. “Is my domain active, and when does it expire? Have its settings changed recently?” If you don’t know who that is, ICANN’s lookup tool will tell you.
3. Whoever last made changes to the site. “What was updated, and can it be put back to the last backup?”

If it looks like a hack, also change the passwords for your hosting account, your website login and your email, and turn on two-step sign-in for each.

Tell customers while it’s fixed

• Your Google Business Profile. Add a short update with your phone number, so people searching for you can still reach you. Don’t mark the business as temporarily closed: that’s for when the business itself is closed, not the website.
• Your phone. If the website normally takes bookings or enquiries, expect more calls, and make sure someone answers them.
• Social media. One post saying the site is down and how to reach you.
• Your email. If the domain expired, email on it stopped too. Once it’s back, check that messages are arriving; our guide to business emails going to spam has a two-minute test.

A few hours offline is unlikely to hurt your place in Google. Google says that if it sees errors on the same page for several days, that page may be dropped from its results, and it advises against leaving a site returning errors for more than a day or two (Google Search Central).

Stop finding out from customers

Most small businesses learn their site is down when a customer tells them, sometimes days later. Three things prevent that: something that checks the site every few minutes and alerts you, someone tracking the domain and certificate renewal dates, and backups that have actually been restored at least once. That’s most of what a good care plan does; our guide to what website maintenance costs covers what to expect and what to pay.

Questions people ask us