Your site is down. You cannot access it. Your customers cannot find you. And every minute it is offline is a minute someone else is getting the call.
Before you start panic-Googling for someone to fix it, work through this checklist. Most outages have a small handful of root causes, and a surprising number of them you can resolve yourself in the next twenty minutes.
If you are past the point of DIY, skip to the bottom. Otherwise, start at Step 1.
The first thing to do is make sure the site is genuinely down, not just down for you. About 1 in 5 "my site is down" calls turn out to be local issues, like a stale DNS cache, a corrupted browser session, or an ISP-level routing problem. Cheap to rule out, expensive to ignore.
Try the site:
If it loads in any of those, the issue is local to your machine or network. Clear your DNS cache (run ipconfig /flushdns on Windows or sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder on Mac), restart your browser, and you are back.
If none of that works, the site is genuinely down for the public. Move to Step 2.
A faster shortcut: visit downforeveryoneorjustme.com or isitdownrightnow.com and paste in your URL. They will tell you in five seconds.
Your host going down takes your site with it. This is the most common cause of outages that are not related to recent changes you made.
Find your hosting provider (Bluehost, SiteGround, GoDaddy, WPEngine, Cloudways, Kinsta, etc.) and check their status page. A quick Google for "[your host] status" will get you there. If they are reporting an active incident, you are waiting for them to fix it. There is nothing you can do.
While you are there, log into your hosting dashboard and check:
Hosting issues account for roughly a third of the emergency outages we see.
If your hosting is fine, the next question is what changed in the last 24 to 48 hours.
Walk through:
A failed plugin update is the single most common cause of WordPress sites going down. Update conflicts cause the white screen of death about as often as actual hacks do. If you can identify the change, the fix is usually rolling it back: deactivate the plugin via FTP or your host file manager, restore the theme from a backup, or revert the WordPress core update.
If you cannot roll it back yourself, this is the point where calling in a developer makes sense. Ten minutes for a pro is faster than three hours of Googling.
If the site loads with a security warning ("not secure," "your connection is not private") or shows up as completely unreachable in your browser but your hosting dashboard works, the issue is probably DNS or SSL.
DNS issues happen when:
Free check: visit dnschecker.org and type in your domain. If different regions show different IPs, you are mid-propagation. Wait it out.
SSL issues are simpler. SSL certificates expire. If yours expires and auto-renewal fails (which happens more than you would think), browsers will block the site outright. Most hosts auto-renew Let's Encrypt certificates every 90 days, but renewal failures are not always reported clearly. Log into your host, find your SSL settings, and check the expiration date.
If your site loads but looks wrong, redirects to a sketchy page, or Google flags it as deceptive in the search results, you have been hacked.
The signs:
If any of these are true, do not log in and start clicking around. The malware can spread, log your keystrokes, and use your session to compromise other accounts. The right move is to take the site offline at the host level, run a malware scanner (Wordfence, Sucuri, or your host built-in scanner), and clean from a known-good backup. This is not a fix-yourself situation in most cases.
If you have identified the issue as something a backup would solve (corruption, hack, broken update, deleted files), restoring is almost always faster than debugging.
The order to check:
Most hosts keep backups in their dashboard under a section called "Backups," "Restore Points," or similar. Restoring usually takes 5 to 15 minutes and reverts everything to the chosen snapshot. If your last backup is from before the issue started, you are back online.
If you have no backups anywhere, your options narrow significantly. A developer can reconstruct from cached content or from your live database, but this is slower and not always possible.
You have worked through the checklist. The site is still down. The issue is one of:
This is the point where calling someone in is faster than continuing alone. A good emergency website repair service will give you a fixed-price quote within an hour, a clear timeline, and confidence in the delivery date. They should not pressure you toward a rebuild unless the existing site is genuinely beyond repair.
If you would rather not be the one doing all of this the next time it happens, a maintenance retainer covers backups, monitoring, and rapid response so you do not end up in this situation again.
We do all of this at Digitari Solutions. Emergency repair starts at $499 with a free 1-hour triage call, a fixed-price quote upfront, and most sites back online next-day.
From Digitari Solutions
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