Why my site is down, and what to check first

A site that will not load is nearly always one of five things. They look identical in a browser and are easy to tell apart from your dashboard.

1. Check the site's status first

Open the site in your dashboard. The status is the fastest answer you will get:

• Active - we believe the site is running. Go to step 2.
• Suspended - the site is stopped. The dashboard says why. The two common reasons are an

unpaid invoice and a malware escalation; both tell you what to do next.

• Restricted - the site is running with limits applied.
• Provisioning or Pending - it is still being built. New sites are usually ready in a

few minutes.

• Failed - the build did not complete. The reason is on the site.

2. Is it the site, or is it the domain?

This is the split that saves the most time, and most "my site is down" reports are the second one.

Open the site's temporary address from the dashboard. Every site has one that does not depend on your domain's DNS.

• The temporary address works, your domain does not - this is DNS, not hosting. Your

domain is not pointing at us, or a change has not finished propagating. See the nameservers article.

• Neither works - the site itself is not serving. Go to step 3.

3. Recent changes are the usual cause

In order of how often they are the answer:

• A plugin or theme update. If it broke immediately after one, that is almost certainly it.
• An edit to a configuration file. A stray character in wp-config.php takes a site down

completely.

• A PHP version change. Older code often will not run on a newer interpreter.

4. If it is none of those

Open a ticket from the site itself rather than from the support page. A ticket raised from the site arrives with the site attached, and we can see its status, its recent deployments and its security state without asking you for anything.

Tell us what changed and when. "It stopped working after I updated a plugin at about 3pm" is worth more than any amount of detail about what the error page says.