Is Your Website Down? How to Find Out in One Minute.

Three different things look exactly the same from the outside

From your phone, a dead website is a dead website. But underneath, three different things can be wrong, with three different fixes and three different people to call.

So before you pay anyone, work out which one you have. You can do it from a phone in about a minute.

Most owners hear about it from a customer, not from the company that runs the site. That is normal.

• Hosting stopped. This is the computer that serves your pages. The bill went unpaid or the card on file expired, so the pages have nowhere to live. Your site files still exist, they just have no home.
• The domain lapsed. The domain is your address, the name people type. If the yearly renewal was missed, the address stops pointing at your site, even though the site itself is fine.
• The site is broken. Hosting is paid and the domain is fine, but the pages do not load properly. Usually an outdated design, a feature that stopped working, or a site builder that shut down.

Test it from your phone on mobile data, not the shop wifi

This is the most useful thing on this page. Turn wifi off on your phone and open your own address using mobile data instead. Most wrong answers come from testing on the same connection your site runs on.

If your site sits on the wifi in your office and that wifi is having a bad day, everything on that network looks broken. Mobile data shows you what a customer across town actually sees.

The phone on mobile data is the test that matters. A computer is a useful second opinion.

• Turn wifi off, open your browser, and type your full address, including the www.
• Ask one person you trust to open it on their phone, on their own network. Their phone has no saved copy of your site.
• Compare the two. If it fails on both, on two different networks, the problem is real.
• Read the screen word for word and write down the exact sentence. It tells you which problem you have.

What each kind of broken page is telling you

The screen you land on is not random. Each kind of failure points at a different cause, and the wording is the clue.

Take a photo of the screen. It saves ten minutes of describing later.

• A parked page. Ads, a list of links, or a page saying the name is for sale where your site used to be. Usually means the domain lapsed and the registrar put something else there.
• An error page. Wording like this site cannot be reached, server not found, or page not found. Points at hosting that is switched off, or a domain that no longer points to anywhere.
• A security warning. A full page that says the connection is not private. Your security certificate ran out. Many visitors will leave without reading it.
• A blank page. Your logo or your menu at the top and empty white space underneath. The site is half loading, which usually means an old site builder or a feature that stopped working.
• A slow, sideways mess. The site loads but is wrong on a phone. That is a broken site rather than a down one, and it loses customers just as fast.

Is the fault yours or your provider's?

Once you know what is broken, the next question is who can fix it. The answer usually comes down to what you pay for and whose name is on the account.

If your hosting bill is in your name and you pay it, the provider fixes it and you are the one who has to ask. If a friend, a former employee or an agency set the site up years ago, the account may be in their name. That is often the real problem.

• The domain: your registrar holds it. If the renewal was missed, only they can restore it, and only from the account that owns it.
• The hosting: whoever you pay monthly or yearly. An unpaid bill is usually a five minute fix once you find the login.
• Your email: if your address is on your domain, it stops about the same time. That is normal, and it comes back with the domain.
• Nobody knows: find the yearly bill. Whichever email address receives the renewal receipts is the one attached to your website account.

What to write in an email to your provider

Keep it short and factual. Support teams work through hundreds of messages, and a calm, specific one gets answered first.

Four lines is plenty: your domain name, what the screen says, when you first noticed it, and what you want them to do. Add your phone number at the end.

Do not guess at the cause. Tell them what you see and let them tell you what is wrong.

• Line one: your domain name, spelled out in full.
• Line two: exactly what the screen says. Copy the words rather than describing them.
• Line three: when it started, and whether it fails on mobile data as well as on wifi.
• Line four: what you want. Ask them to confirm the account is active and paid, and to tell you what is wrong.
• A photo of the screen attached to the email saves a round of questions.

When the honest answer is that the site is not worth fixing

Sometimes the diagnosis is clear and the answer is still no. If the site is old, was hand built years ago, or only works on a big screen, paying someone to bring it back buys you a few weeks and another invoice.

That happens more often than you would think. Of the local business websites we checked across eight US metros, 27% were broken. Many were already slow and awkward on a phone long before they stopped loading at all.

Patching a site like that is not a waste because of the price. It is a waste because it breaks again, and next time you will have less patience.

• Do not pay to patch a site that was already bad on a phone. It breaks again.
• Do not start a monthly fee to keep an old design alive.
• Do not pay to revive something you cannot look at on your own phone first.
• If the domain is the only part worth keeping, renew that and let the rest go.

A working site on your own domain, within a day

LocalSiteShop finds local US businesses whose website is broken, missing or unusable on a phone, rebuilds it, and sends a free preview before asking for anything.

The preview is five pages: home, services, about, FAQ and contact. It uses your own services, your area and your opening hours, with a real map and a tap to call button. It is built phone first and loads in under a second.

If you want it live, the price is $600 flat, one time. No retainer, no monthly fee for the first year, no contract and no sales call. You pay by a reply to email link, by card, or by bank transfer, and the site goes live on the domain you already own within 24 hours of you saying yes. You keep the preview either way. Finished examples are at https://preview.localsiteshop.com/

• Five pages, on the domain you already own and already pay for.
• Real map, tap to call, phone first, loads in under a second.
• Preview free before any payment. $600 flat, one time, if you want it live.

Questions we get about this