My website is down — what do I do?
The short answer
Check whether it is actually down for everyone rather than just you, then work through four causes in order: an expired domain, expired hosting, an SSL certificate that lapsed, or a change someone made. Most outages at small businesses are a missed renewal rather than a technical fault — and that is good news, because it means the fix is a payment rather than an engineer.
On this page
First, confirm it is actually down
Before anything else, rule out the most common false alarm: it is down for you and fine for everyone else.
- Try it on mobile data with wifi off. If it loads, it is your network or your router's DNS, not your site.
- Try a different browser, or a private window. If that works, it is a cached page on your machine.
- Ask someone in a different place to try it.
This takes two minutes and resolves a meaningful share of "the website is down" calls before they become calls.
Then check these four, in order
1. Has the domain expired?
The most common cause at a small business, and the most alarming-looking. An expired domain takes everything down at once — site and often email with it — which makes it look like a catastrophic failure rather than an unpaid invoice.
Check the expiry on any WHOIS service. If it has lapsed, renew immediately: there is a grace period, and it does not last. Then turn auto-renew on so this cannot recur.
2. Has the hosting lapsed?
Same shape, different bill. Log in to the hosting account and look for an overdue invoice or a suspension notice. Often the card on file expired and the reminder went to an address nobody reads any more.
3. Has the SSL certificate expired?
This one looks different: the site loads but the browser shows a full-page security warning that most visitors will not click past.
Most modern hosting renews certificates automatically, so this usually means the automatic renewal broke. Reissuing is quick for whoever manages the hosting.
4. Did someone change something?
If it broke right after a change, that is your cause — a plugin update, a new theme, an edit to a settings file, a DNS change made while moving something.
If you know what changed, undo it. If a backup exists from before the change, restore it. This is the moment those backups either exist or do not.
What to do while it is down
Post on your social accounts. One line: we are aware, here is our phone number in the meantime. This costs nothing and prevents the assumption that you have closed.
Check your email still works. Email frequently runs on the same domain, so an expired domain takes both. If enquiries are bouncing, that is more urgent than the site.
Update your Google Business Profile if the outage will last. It carries your phone number and hours independently of your site, and for local searches it is often what people see first anyway.
When most of this cannot happen
Three of the four causes above are billing and certificate problems on infrastructure you are managing yourself. On a managed platform they are not your failure modes — Helm handles the hosting, the certificate renewals and the monitoring, and the domain stays registered to your business with auto-renew on.
What remains is the one thing worth keeping in your own hands anyway: knowing the domain is yours and knowing how to reach it.
Preventing the repeat
Nearly all of this is preventable with three settings and one habit:
- Auto-renew on the domain, with a card that will not expire before it does
- Auto-renew on hosting, billed to an address a person actually reads
- Automatic SSL renewal, which most hosts do by default
- Know where things are. Registrar, host, and who has access. Written down somewhere that is not one person's inbox.
The outage that costs a small business the most is rarely the technically complex one. It is the renewal notice sent to a former employee's email address.