// troubleshooting · 5 min read
What to do when your website breaks
A broken website feels like an emergency, and sometimes it is. More often it is one of a small number of things, and the first ten minutes decide whether you lose a day or a customer. Here is the order to work through.
First, find out what is actually broken
Check your site from a different network before anything else. Turn off wifi and load it on your phone. If it works on cellular but not on your office network, the problem is your network, not your website, and you have just saved yourself an afternoon.
If it is broken everywhere, check whether it is broken for everyone. Ask a customer or a colleague to load it. A site that fails for you alone is usually a browser cache or an extension, and both clear in seconds.
Separate the three different failures
A site can fail in ways that look identical to a visitor and have nothing to do with each other. Naming the failure correctly is most of the diagnosis.
- Down. Nothing loads at all. This is usually hosting, a domain problem, or an expired certificate.
- Slow. It loads, eventually. Usually a performance or traffic problem, and often fixable without touching code.
- Wrong. It loads fine but shows the wrong content, the wrong prices, or an old version of a page. Usually a caching problem, which is the most common and most easily fixed of the three.
Gather these five things before you call anyone
Whoever helps you will ask for these, and having them ready can turn a two-day exchange into a twenty-minute fix.
- The exact URL where you see the problem, not just the homepage.
- A screenshot of what you see, including any error message.
- When it last worked. "It was fine yesterday" narrows things enormously.
- What changed recently. A new plugin, a hosting bill, a domain renewal, a content update. Something usually changed.
- Whether it affects everyone or just you.
The things that are genuinely urgent
Two failures justify waking someone up: your site is down and you are losing sales, or you have been locked out of accounts and suspect a security problem. Those are real emergencies.
Almost everything else can wait for business hours without costing you much. A slow site, a broken layout on one page, a contact form that sends to the wrong address: these matter, but they are not the same as a site that is gone.
How we handle it
We inherit broken sites regularly, which is why migrations and rescues are one of our services. The first thing we do is not fix anything. It is work out what is actually wrong, because the most expensive mistake in a rescue is confidently fixing the wrong thing.
If you are mid-emergency and want a second opinion, get in touch and describe what you are seeing. We will tell you honestly whether it is urgent.