What should you do when your website goes down?

Confirm it is really down and for whom, check the obvious external causes such as domain, hosting and certificate, restore from the last good state if a recent change caused it, tell your users, and then work out why so that it does not recur.

By Nazar Kashuba · Reviewed

Outages feel urgent and cause rushed mistakes. A short checklist helps.

First, in order

  1. Confirm. Check from another network or device, and with an outside checking tool. It may be your connection.
  2. Look at the usual external causes. Has the domain expired? Is the hosting account suspended or the provider reporting a problem? Has the certificate expired?
  3. Ask what changed. Most outages follow a recent update or deployment. If so, roll back to the last working version.
  4. Check logs and resource limits. Errors, full disk, exhausted memory or database.
  5. Restore from backup if data or files are damaged.
  6. Tell people. A short, honest status message to customers, and a note to your team.

Afterwards

  • Find the real cause, not only the trigger.
  • Write down what happened and what will prevent it.
  • Add the check that would have alerted you sooner.

Finding out before your customers do

Use uptime monitoring that checks from outside and alerts you by message or email, and monitors important functions, such as the booking form, not just the home page. Set renewals of domain and certificate with reminders that someone actually reads.

Calm, documented procedures are what make an outage a nuisance rather than a crisis.

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