Website offline: the safe first checks
An offline website is urgent, but repeated restarts and rushed DNS changes can hide the real fault. Start by proving what visitors actually experience.
1. Confirm the outage
- Open the website on a second connection, such as mobile data, and try one internal page.
- Record the exact message, status code and time. Take a screenshot without exposing private information.
- Check whether the hosting provider reports an incident.
2. Check the public boundaries
- Confirm the domain has not expired and the visible address is spelled correctly.
- Inspect the certificate warning and expiry date, but do not bypass a security warning.
- If email and the website failed together, record that because DNS or hosting may be the shared boundary.
3. Know when to stop
- Stop if the site shows a database error, repeated 500 error or unfamiliar server message.
- Stop if checkout, customer accounts or personal data may be affected.
- Give support the evidence you collected instead of changing several systems at once.
4. After recovery: check the pages customers need
- Recheck a service page and an important customer journey as well as the homepage. Record the final public URLs and response codes.
- Ask whether temporary maintenance or indexing restrictions were removed after recovery. Compare the important URL in Search Console with the restored page.
- A site coming back online does not prove that search visibility has recovered. Keep the incident timeline and monitor subsequent crawling and search traffic before attributing a change to the repair.
Sources and further reading
Prepared with AI assistance and checked against the linked primary documentation on 9 September 2026. Practical guidance, not a claim of a new platform release or guaranteed results.
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