Your Site Is Down: What to Do in the First 15 Minutes
The instinct during an outage is to start changing things. That is how a thirty-minute incident becomes a four-hour one, because now nobody knows which change caused what. Work the list instead.
Minutes 0 to 3: confirm and scope
- Load the site on cellular data, not office wifi.
- Check a third-party down-checker to see whether it is down for everyone.
- Note the exact error: browser certificate warning, 500 error, blank page, database connection error, timeout, or "site not found." Each points somewhere different.
- Check your host's status page.
Minutes 3 to 8: check the usual suspects, in order
- Domain and DNS. Is the domain expired? Do the DNS records still point at your host?
- Certificate. If it is a security warning, this is your answer.
- Recent changes. Did anyone update a plugin, publish a page, change a setting, or run a deploy in the last 24 hours? This finds the cause more often than anything else on the list.
- Billing. Suspended hosting accounts produce very convincing outages.
Minutes 8 to 15: act
If a recent change is the likely cause, roll it back rather than debugging forward. If the platform is throwing a fatal error, the fastest safe move is usually to restore the most recent backup to a staging environment, confirm it is healthy, and then decide between promoting it and repairing production. Open a ticket with your host in parallel; queue time runs while you work.
Tell people
Post a short note on the channel your customers use, and if the phone still works, say so. "Our website is temporarily down, we are on it, call us at this number" preserves the business while the site is unavailable. Silence during an outage costs more than the outage.
Afterwards, write it down
One paragraph: what broke, what fixed it, how long it took, and what would have caught it earlier. That paragraph is what turns the next occurrence into a five-minute event, and the list of those paragraphs is the most valuable operations document a small business can keep.
