WordPress Site Down? A Calm Troubleshooting Checklist

When WordPress goes down, first determine whether the failure is local, DNS-related, hosting-wide, application-level, or caused by a recent change. That prevents random fixes from making the incident worse.

1. Confirm the scope

Test from another network/device and check whether the admin area, homepage, and a static asset all fail in the same way.

2. Check recent changes

Plugin updates, theme changes, PHP-version changes, DNS edits, deployments, and expired certificates are common incident clues.

3. Check the hosting layer

Look for provider status information, resource exhaustion, server errors, or account-level problems. If you have access to logs, preserve the error details before making changes.

4. Roll back carefully

If a recent change clearly caused the outage, use a tested rollback or backup rather than editing production files blindly.

5. Prevent the next incident

Document the cause, keep independent backups where appropriate, monitor uptime, and reduce unnecessary complexity in the plugin and hosting stack.