What to Do When Your WordPress Site Is Down
- Verify it's actually down (not just you): try a different device, network, or use Down For Everyone Or Just Me
- Check your hosting provider's status page for known outages
- Confirm your domain hasn't expired
- Try accessing
/wp-admindirectly—if the dashboard loads, the issue is front-end specific - If none of this helps within 30 minutes, or you see security warnings, stop troubleshooting and call for professional WordPress emergency support
There's a particular kind of panic that hits when you realize "my WordPress site is down." Maybe a customer emailed asking why your site won't load. Maybe you noticed it yourself while checking something routine. Either way, you're now staring at an error message, your mind racing through the implications: lost sales, missed donations, frustrated visitors, damage to your reputation.
Take a breath. This guide will help you figure out what's happening and—more importantly—when to keep troubleshooting versus when to pick up the phone.
First: Confirm Your Site Is Actually Down
Before you panic, make sure your site is genuinely offline, not just misbehaving for you. A WordPress site not loading on your computer doesn't necessarily mean it's down for everyone—local issues can masquerade as site outages.
Check from multiple angles. Try loading your site on your phone using cellular data (not WiFi). Ask a colleague in a different location to check. Use a tool like Down For Everyone Or Just Me or Is It Down Right Now to get an outside perspective.
Clear your DNS cache. Your computer remembers where websites live, and sometimes that memory gets stale. On Windows, open Command Prompt and run ipconfig /flushdns. On Mac, open Terminal and run sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder. Then try loading your site again.
Rule out browser issues. Try a different browser or an incognito/private window. Browser extensions, cached files, or corrupted cookies can all create the illusion that a site is down when it's actually fine.
If your site loads on other devices or from other locations but not on yours, the problem is local—your ISP, your network, or your device. That's actually good news; your visitors aren't affected.
If nobody can reach your site from anywhere, it's time to diagnose what's actually wrong.
The 5 Most Common Reasons Your WordPress Site Is Down
Understanding why a WordPress website goes down helps you troubleshoot faster—and helps you recognize when you're in over your head.
Plugin or Theme Conflict
This is the most common culprit, especially if your site was working fine until recently. A plugin update introduces a bug. A theme update conflicts with an existing plugin. Two plugins that worked independently suddenly clash after one gets updated.
The telltale signs: your site broke immediately after an update, you see a "white screen of death" (completely blank page), or you get a specific PHP error mentioning a plugin or theme file.
Hosting or Server Issues
Sometimes the problem isn't your WordPress installation at all—it's the server it runs on. Shared hosting environments are particularly vulnerable: when another site on your server consumes too many resources, it affects everyone. Server hardware fails. Data centers have network issues.
Signs this might be your problem: your site worked fine with no recent changes, you can't access your hosting control panel either, or your hosting provider's status page shows an ongoing incident.
Domain or DNS Problems
Your domain is the address that tells browsers where to find your site. If that mapping breaks—because your domain expired, DNS records were misconfigured, or propagation from a recent change hasn't completed—your site becomes unreachable even though everything else is working perfectly.
Indicators: you get "server not found" or "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN" errors, you recently made DNS changes, or you're approaching your domain's renewal date.
Database Connection Errors
WordPress stores all your content—posts, pages, settings, and user information—in a database. If WordPress can't connect to that database, you'll typically see the dreaded "Error establishing a database connection" message.
This can happen because your database server is overloaded or down, your database credentials have changed, your database has been corrupted, or you've hit storage limits.
Security Breach or Hack
The most alarming scenario. Hackers may have defaced your site, injected malware that's triggering security warnings, or your host may have suspended your account after detecting malicious activity.
Warning signs: your browser shows security warnings, Google flags your site as dangerous, you see content you didn't create, or your host sent a security notice.
Quick Fixes You Can Try Right Now
If you're comfortable with basic troubleshooting and your site isn't showing signs of a security breach, these steps might get you back online quickly.
Check Your Hosting Provider's Status Page
Before you start troubleshooting your WordPress installation, verify that the infrastructure is healthy. Most hosts maintain status pages—Cloudways, WP Engine, SiteGround, and others all publish real-time infrastructure status. If there's a known outage, your troubleshooting won't help; just wait (and maybe follow up with support for updates).
Verify Your Domain Hasn't Expired
Log in to your domain registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, wherever you registered your domain) and check the expiration date. If it lapsed, renewing it should restore access within a few hours as DNS propagates.
Try Accessing /wp-admin Directly
Navigate to yourdomain.com/wp-admin. If the WordPress dashboard loads even though your front-end doesn't, you've narrowed the problem significantly—something specific to your theme or a front-end plugin is causing the issue, not your entire WordPress installation.
Clear Your Caching Layers
Modern WordPress sites often have multiple caching layers: browser cache, plugin-based page cache, server-level cache, and CDN cache. Any of these can serve outdated or broken content.
If you can access your dashboard, go to your caching plugin's settings and clear the cache. If you use Cloudflare or another CDN, log in to their dashboard and purge the cache. Some hosts also have server-level caching that you can clear from your hosting control panel.
Enable WordPress Debug Mode (With Caution)
This requires FTP or file manager access to your site. Edit your wp-config.php file and find the line that says define('WP_DEBUG', false);. Change it to:
define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);This tells WordPress to log errors to a file (wp-content/debug.log) without displaying them publicly. Check that log file for specific error messages that might point to the problem.
Important: Turn debug mode off when you're done troubleshooting. Leaving it on can expose sensitive information and slightly impact performance.
When to Stop and Call for Professional Help
Here's where most guides fail you. They give you a checklist of things to try, but they don't tell you when to stop trying. Knowing when to escalate is just as important as knowing how to troubleshoot.
Stop immediately if you see security warnings. If your browser displays malware warnings, if Google Search Console shows security issues, or if your host emailed you about a compromise—stop. Don't touch anything else. You need professional help to properly clean the infection without destroying evidence of how the breach occurred or inadvertently spreading the damage.
Stop if quick fixes haven't worked within 30 minutes. If you've checked the basics and your site is still down, continued poking around is more likely to make things worse than better. Every minute your site is down costs you something. The ROI from professional help improves the longer you struggle.
Stop if you don't have verified backup access. Before you make any significant changes—deactivating plugins, switching themes, editing files—you need to be confident you can restore your site if something goes wrong. If you don't have a recent backup you know works, or you're not sure how to restore it, get help before you make changes you can't undo.
Stop if the error involves database or server configuration. "Error establishing database connection," PHP memory limits, server timeout errors—these require access and expertise beyond what most site owners have. Making changes at this level without knowing exactly what you're doing can compound the problem.
Stop if this has happened multiple times recently. A WordPress site that keeps going down has an underlying issue that quick fixes won't solve. You need someone to diagnose the root cause, not just apply another band-aid.
The Frustrating Reality of Traditional Hosting Support
Here's what happens when most people call their hosting provider for help during an outage:
You wait on hold. When you finally reach someone, you explain your problem to a support agent who follows a script. They ask you to clear your cache (you already did). They ask you to deactivate your plugins (they don't know which ones your site depends on). Eventually, they tell you the server is fine on their end, so the problem must be with your WordPress installation. "You'll need to contact a developer."
This is the dirty secret of budget hosting: their support covers the server, not your site. If the issue isn't definitively due to their infrastructure, it's not their problem. They're not being malicious—it's just how their support is structured. They have hundreds of thousands of customers and scripts to resolve the most common issues quickly. Anything that falls outside the script becomes your problem to solve.
We've heard countless stories from clients who came to us after this exact experience. They'd been on hold with Bluehost or GoDaddy for an hour, only to be told their account was "using too many resources" or that they needed to "contact a WordPress developer." They were stuck between a host who wouldn't help and a site that wouldn't load, losing money and credibility with every passing hour.
What Happens When You Call FatLab for WordPress Emergency Support
When you contact FatLab for WordPress emergency support, you reach experienced WordPress developers directly. There's no tiered support system, no scripts, no escalation queue. The person who answers your ticket will fix your problem.
Immediate triage and diagnosis. We start by understanding what you're experiencing and when it started. We check your server, WordPress installation, plugins, and database—the complete picture. We're not looking to assign blame; we're looking to identify the actual cause.
We take full responsibility. This is the fundamental difference. We don't care whether your site is down because of a server issue, a bad plugin update, a configuration problem, or something else entirely. Our job is to get your site back online. If the server is the problem, we'll fix it or move your site to a healthy infrastructure. If a plugin update broke something, we'll fix it or roll it back. If we need to coordinate with a third-party service, we handle that communication.
Even when outages stem from third parties beyond anyone's control—like when Cloudflare has an incident affecting millions of sites—we don't leave you in the dark. We monitor the situation, run diagnostics to confirm it's genuinely a third-party issue, keep you informed throughout, and verify everything is working properly once service is restored.
Root cause analysis, not just band-aids. Getting your site back online is the immediate priority. But we also figure out why it went down in the first place. Maybe a plugin needs to be replaced. Maybe your hosting resources need adjustment. Maybe you need better monitoring. We address the underlying issue so you're not back in crisis mode next month.
Prevention planning. After we stabilize your site, we will discuss how to prevent future emergencies. This might mean implementing proactive monitoring, setting up a staging environment for testing updates, improving your backup strategy, or restructuring how updates are applied to your site.
"Since migrating to FatLab, we've experienced zero downtime and prompt, effective responses to every question."
—Jason Wu, Director of Operations, Human Services Council
The Real Cost of WordPress Downtime
It's easy to underestimate the actual cost of an outage. The direct revenue loss is obvious—if your site takes donations or processes sales, every hour offline is money not collected. But the secondary costs add up quickly, too.
SEO impact. Search engines regularly check your site. Extended downtime—especially repeated outages—can hurt your rankings as Google's crawlers encounter errors. If you've worked hard to build organic traffic, a string of outages can undo months of progress.
Customer trust and reputation. When someone clicks a link to your site and gets an error, they don't know you're scrambling to fix it. They just know your site doesn't work. Some will try again later. Many won't. For nonprofits running campaigns, for businesses in competitive markets, for anyone whose site is a primary point of contact—this impression matters.
Staff time spent troubleshooting. Every hour you or your team spends dealing with an outage is an hour not spent on your actual work. If you're paying an agency or internal staff to figure out why your site won't load, the bill adds up fast—often exceeding what professional support would have cost in the first place.
Stress and distraction. This one's harder to quantify, but it's real. An outage during a critical period—a fundraising push, a product launch, a media mention—creates stress that ripples through your organization. People make worse decisions under pressure. Other projects slip while everyone focuses on the crisis.
How to Prevent Future Emergencies
Nobody can guarantee 100% uptime. Even Facebook, Netflix, and LinkedIn go down sometimes. But you can dramatically reduce the frequency and severity of outages with the right approach.
Proactive monitoring. Don't wait for customers to tell you your site is down. Monitoring services check your site continuously and alert you (or your support team) the moment something goes wrong. The faster you know about a problem, the faster you can fix it. At FatLab, our 24/7 monitoring often catches issues before clients notice anything wrong.
Staging environments for testing updates. Updates are necessary—they patch security vulnerabilities and add features. But they're also the leading cause of site breakage. Testing updates in a staging environment first lets you catch conflicts before they take down your production site.
Regular backups with tested restoration. Backups are worthless if they don't work or if you don't know how to restore them. Your backup strategy should include: automatic daily backups, offsite storage (so a server failure doesn't take your backups too), retention of multiple backup versions, and periodic test restorations to verify everything works.
Managed WordPress support. This is ultimately the most reliable prevention strategy. Instead of scrambling to fix problems yourself or waiting on hold with a host who considers your WordPress installation "not their problem," you work with a team that provides true WordPress emergency support and takes full responsibility for your site's uptime and health.
"Our website is a crucial community resource that must be available 24/7/365. Since switching from our previous host a few years ago, we've experienced no slowdowns, security issues, or downtime."
—Kristin Cantwell, VP of Development & Communications, Safe+Sound Somerset
Ready to Stop Worrying About Your Next Outage?
If you're reading this during an active emergency, we can help. Contact FatLab directly to discuss your situation. We can often take over a crisis in progress, stabilize your site, and then talk about ongoing support once you're back online.
If you're reading this to prevent the next emergency, we should discuss migrating your site to FatLab. We handle the entire migration at no charge, with zero downtime, and you'll have our full WordPress support services from day one.
Schedule a Free Consultation to discuss your WordPress support needs. We'll review your current setup, identify any vulnerabilities, and explain exactly how we'd handle your site differently.
Not ready to talk yet? Check out our FAQ on support services or read why organizations choose us over Bluehost and GoDaddy.
WordPress Emergency Support FAQs
How quickly can you respond to an emergency?
Our ticket system operates 24/7/365, and we treat genuine outages as urgent regardless of the time of day. During an active site-down emergency, we work to stabilize your site immediately. Refinement and root cause analysis happen during regular business hours, but getting you back online doesn't wait.
What if my site is down outside business hours?
If your site is truly down, we'll address it. Our monitoring systems run around the clock, and urgent issues get urgent attention. We prioritize stabilization first—getting your site functional—and then address underlying issues during normal hours.
How much does emergency support cost?
For FatLab clients, emergency support is included in your plan with no extra fees. We don't charge premiums for urgent issues or after-hours work. For non-clients experiencing an emergency, we can discuss bringing your site to FatLab—we'll help you get out of the crisis and into a stable, supported environment.
Can you help if I'm not a current client?
We don't offer one-off emergency fixes for sites we don't manage—it's too hard to do quality work without knowing a site's history and configuration. However, we can migrate your site to FatLab and address the emergency during the transition. Many of our long-term clients came to us in exactly this situation: stuck in a crisis with a host or developer who couldn't (or wouldn't) help, looking for someone to take ownership of the problem.
What's the difference between FatLab and calling my hosting provider?
Traditional hosts separate "their problem" (server infrastructure) from "your problem" (everything else). If the server is technically online, even if your WordPress site won't load, many hosts will tell you to contact a developer.
FatLab takes full responsibility for your site. Server issue? We fix it—or move your site. Plugin conflict? We fix it. Database problem? We fix it. We don't draw lines about who's at fault; we focus on getting your site working.
What if the issue is with a third party like Cloudflare?
When major services experience outages, they affect millions of sites simultaneously—there's no "fixing" on our end. But we don't disappear during these incidents. We monitor the situation, run diagnostics to confirm your issue is genuinely part of the larger outage (not a coincidental separate problem), keep you informed throughout, and verify everything is working properly once service is restored.
This article is part of our WordPress Support Services resource hub. For more on how FatLab approaches support differently, read about our personal approach vs. traditional tiered systems.