Is Your Website Down Right Now? Here’s How to Know

There’s not much worse for your organization than a community member reaching out to you and saying, “Hey – your website is down!”

It’s especially jarring if no one on your marketing or creative team knew about it first.

That’s a bad user experience and a bad customer experience, so it’s something you certainly want to avoid.

But how do you know if your website is down, besides constantly refreshing it in your own browser?

Here’s what you should do.

Use an Alert System to Check for Downtime

It sounds elementary, but constantly checking to make sure your site is up really is nothing more than refreshing your browser every so often to ensure the page loads.

Thankfully, you don’t actually need to keep a tab open and hard refresh every 15 minutes to check – there’s software for that.

These “uptime checkers” generally do the same thing:

• Every few minutes (you can normally set), the software pings your website
• If it gets a positive response, no action is taken
• If it gets a negative response, it waits a prescribed amount of time and pings again
• If it gets a second negative response, it alerts you that the site is down

(Two negative responses are needed to ensure the site is actually down – one negative response may just be a blip or temporary server issue.)

The alert software that we at Digital Ink use is StatusCake, which offers multiple options for how often to check your site’s health, and includes a ton of ways to alert you if the site is down. If one of our clients’ sites is down, we get text messages, emails, Slack notifications, and app notifications – so it’s tough to miss.

Previously, we’ve used Pingdom’s website monitoring service, but there are a number of other options out there, including Uptime.com, Uptime Robot, and Better Stack.

How to Check for False Positives

If you get an alert that your website is down, you should immediately confirm whether or not that’s true. It is definitely possible to get a false positive, or find yourself in a situation where some people may see the site down and others don’t.

To confirm whether your site is down or not, you should:

• have multiple members of your team (ideally in different physical locations) check if the site is accessible
• use different browsers and devices to check
• check using your phone off of Wi-Fi (so you can test with your carrier’s network instead of your home/office Internet)

If you’re the only person who can check or everyone is in the same physical location, then use one of our favorite tools: Downforeveryoneorjustme.com. This third-party service will ping your website and let you know if they’re able to access it, and let you know whether or not it’s just you having the problem.

(It’s also a great site to check on any availability issues for popular sites you may use for digital marketing or social media, like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.)

What to Do When Your Site is Down

If your website is down, then you need to figure out what happened, where it happened, and how to fix it.

Sometimes it’s easy – perhaps your website server is unexpectedly down – and sometimes it’s difficult, like a WordPress plugin update is incompatible with your site and broke everything.

When we confirm that a website is down, we immediately:

• check to see if we can connect to the website server; if we can, then it’s usually not a hosting issue
• attempt to login to the backend of WordPress; if we can, then something else is at play

Thankfully, we’ve been doing this long enough to quickly figure out what the problem is and how to address it, which we do for all of our website management clients. If you’re interested in learning more or have questions, feel free to reach out and let’s chat.