What to do when a WordPress website goes down

First, stay calm and check three things

A down site feels like an emergency. Take two minutes to check the basics before changing anything.

• Is it down for everyone? Ask a friend on their phone, or use a down-for-everyone checker.
• Is your host having an outage? Check your hosting provider's status page.
• Did anything change recently? A plugin update, a new theme, an expired payment — the cause is usually the newest change.

The most common causes

WordPress sites rarely break on their own. Something changed. The usual suspects: a plugin or theme update that conflicts with another, a hacked site, an expired domain or hosting bill, or a server problem on your host's side.

If you see a white, blank page — the famous 'white screen of death' — a PHP error is usually behind it. If you see strange ads, redirects or warnings, think malware.

Fix the white screen of death

The fastest fix: log in to your hosting control panel and disable your plugins. Rename the plugins folder if you have to. If the site comes back, turn plugins on one at a time until you find the troublemaker.

If that feels risky, stop. A professional can usually restore a white-screen site within hours. Our website fix service handles this exact scenario from $49–$149, and emergency same-day fixes run $249 for up to two hours of work.

Restore from backup

If your site is hacked or badly broken, the safest path is often restoring yesterday's clean backup — after the cause is found, or it will break again.

This is why backups matter more than any other security measure. If you do not have automatic daily backups, make that your very next task. Our backup setup service handles it from $249, including monitoring.

Stop it happening again

Most outages come from outdated software or missing backups. A care plan solves both: updates applied safely, backups taken daily, uptime watched around the clock. From $49/mo — less than one panicked afternoon.