Your Website Stopped Loading: What to Check, in Order, Before You Call Anyone
Tuesday, half past eight. A customer rings to say they typed in your company address and got a blank screen with an error message instead of your website. You try it yourself on your phone and nothing loads. The first thought is usually that somebody broke something, and the second is that fixing it will cost a fortune and take a week.
It is almost never that bad. A business website stops loading for a handful of repeatable reasons, and you can identify most of them yourself in five minutes with no technical knowledge at all. The order you check them in matters in practice. If you call your developer with „it’s not working” and nothing else, the two of you will spend half a day establishing things you could establish faster on your own, because you have the screen in front of you. What follows runs from the most common causes down to the ones that genuinely are rare.
Step zero: is the problem the website, or your own computer
Open the address on your phone over mobile data, with wi-fi switched off. Then ask somebody in another town to type it in at their end. Finally try it in a private browser window, because a cached old version can keep showing you an error that disappeared an hour ago.
If the site loads normally on a different network and a different device, there is no outage. The problem sits locally: browser cache, your internet provider’s DNS server, or a filter on the office network. If it loads nowhere, write down the exact wording of the message and take a screenshot. That message tells you which of the causes below applies to you, and it will cut your later conversation with support in half.
| What the browser shows | Most likely cause |
|---|---|
| „Address not found”, „DNS server cannot be found” | expired domain, or freshly changed DNS that has not propagated yet |
| „Your connection is not private”, a certificate warning | expired SSL certificate |
| A registrar page saying the domain has expired | domain past its renewal date |
| A hosting provider notice about a suspended account or a traffic limit | unpaid or overloaded hosting |
| A 500 error or a blank white page | a problem on the server or in the application |
| Very slow loading that ends in a timeout | the server is down or overloaded |
An expired domain: cause number one
Top of the list is not a technical fault at all, it is an unpaid invoice. A domain renews once a year, and the reminder goes to the email address given at registration, which is often a mailbox nobody has read in three years, or the address of an employee who left.
You can check this in a minute in the public WHOIS database. Any lookup service such as who.is will do for most endings, and country registries run their own search pages, NASK for Polish .pl domains among them. Type in your address and look at the expiry date. If it was yesterday, you have your answer and can stop looking.
The good news is that a domain does not vanish the second it expires. Most registrars keep a window in which the previous holder can still recover it, usually measured in weeks, though often with an extra restoration fee. The bad news: once that window closes the domain goes back into the pool and anybody can buy it, competitors included. That makes this the one item on the list worth acting on the same day.
While you are in WHOIS, check one more field: whose details the domain is registered to. If it names an agency you worked with five years ago, you have a second problem, currently dormant. I went through that one in the piece on what you are actually paying for with hosting, a domain and SSL.
The SSL certificate expired, the site is alive
This case is confusing, because the site works fine and the browser simply refuses to show it. Your customer sees a red warning screen telling them the connection is not secure, and nine times out of ten they go back to the search results and click a competitor. From where you sit it looks identical to an outage, even though your files are sitting untouched on the server.
Let’s Encrypt certificates, which most hosting providers use today, are valid for 90 days and renew automatically. A certificate error usually means that automation jammed somewhere, typically after a server move or after a domain was repointed. Fixing it is a job for your hosting provider and takes them a quarter of an hour, but somebody has to tell them. The error does not report itself anywhere.
Hosting: the invoice, the limit, or a plain server failure
Three scenarios look similar and get solved differently. An unpaid hosting invoice usually ends with a suspended account and a provider notice where your site should be, so you will recognise it straight away. An exceeded traffic limit is rare on an ordinary business site, and tends to show up after somebody uploaded a gallery of photos weighing fifteen megabytes each. The third possibility is simply an outage at the provider.
That last one is faster to check than you would think. Open your hosting provider’s status page, or their social media profile. If the servers are down, several dozen people are already asking the same question in the comments, and you know there is nothing to do but wait.
A recent migration: DNS needs time
If your site stopped working within a day of changing hosting, registrar or developer, the odds are that nothing is broken. A change of name servers spreads across the internet gradually, and for anywhere from a few to several dozen hours some visitors still see the old address while others see the new one. That is why the site opens for you and not for a customer on the next street.
During that window, resist the urge to fix things yourself, because every further settings change extends the split. How to plan a migration so the gap stays as short as possible is covered in the piece on moving your website to another provider.
Who to call, and what to have ready
Once you roughly know where the problem sits, reporting it takes minutes instead of days. Have six pieces of information ready, ideally in a single message:
- the exact address that is failing,
- the wording of the error and a screenshot,
- how long it has been happening and what changed just before (a payment, a migration, any edit at all),
- whether another network and another device behave the same way,
- who your domain is with and who your hosting is with,
- who besides you has access to the control panel.
If you cannot answer those last two, that is a separate thing to sort out, just not today. For now it is enough to say so plainly in your message, because support will ask about it first anyway.
How to make it less likely next time
Four habits cut mornings like this one down to almost nothing. The domain registered in your own name, not your developer’s. A current email address in your registrar’s records, verified once a year. Automatic renewal switched on wherever the registrar offers it. And one date in your phone calendar, set two weeks before the domain expires, so the reminder reaches you even when the email lands in spam.
That is fifteen minutes once a year, and it belongs in the same routine as reviewing the content on your site. I put that routine together as a list of what to keep updated on your website.
When you never have to work through this list at all
This is where I describe my own product, so read it with the appropriate scepticism. Several of the causes above exist because the domain, the hosting and the build sit with three different companies, with nobody in between keeping an eye on all three. With Sitario those three live in one place: hosting and the SSL certificate renew without your involvement, the domain is registered in your name, and we send an email reminder before the period ends, so „the domain expired and nobody noticed” takes several ignored messages to achieve.
The prices come from the price list rather than a negotiation. The Start plan is a one-off PLN 249 including the first year of hosting, and renewal from year two starts at PLN 149 a year. If you ever decide not to renew, the site stops being hosted, but the domain stays yours and you download the complete source files with one click. The difference between technical babysitting and real work on a site is something I set out in the piece on website care and what is worth paying for.
Who is this not for? If you run a shop wired into stock management, or a booking system tied to outside software, you need somebody who knows your configuration and picks up the phone at seven in the morning. And if you already have a reliable administrator who answers within fifteen minutes, there is nothing here to change.
In summary
A business website outage almost always comes down to one of four things: an expired domain, an expired certificate, a hosting problem, or a migration that happened yesterday. Five calm minutes of checking turns panic into a specific report, and a specific report shortens the downtime from days to hours.
Do one thing today, even if your site is working fine. Open a WHOIS lookup, type in your address and check two fields: the expiry date and whose details the domain is registered to. If both are in order, put the renewal date in your calendar and get back to work.