is my website down right now
Is my site down right now? The 60-second diagnostic, in plain terms.
A six-step ladder a small shop owner can run in under sixty seconds to find out whether the site is really down, what is failing, and what to do next.
3 min read Updated
The first five minutes of a possible outage are the worst five minutes. You do not know whether the site is really down or whether your browser is the problem. You do not know whether a customer is seeing the same thing you are. You do not know whether the right next step is to call the host, the developer, or the registrar. The ladder below is what I run myself before I do anything else. Six checks, each one takes ten seconds, and the order is the point.
The 60-second diagnostic ladder
First, load the home page in a fresh private window. A private window bypasses your cache and your DNS cache. If the home page is up, the issue is on your end and almost certainly cache-related.
Second, paste the home page into a free external uptime check. If the external check says the home page is up and your browser is the only one complaining, the issue is browser-or-DNS-cache related and probably transient. If the external check agrees with your browser that the page is down, the issue is real.
Third, paste the URL into a TLS checker. If the home page loads but the cert chain is throwing a warning, the issue is a renewal failure or a CA chain update that did not roll out cleanly. The browser safety net has often kicked in by then; the message will be "your connection is not private." For the deeper diagnosis cadence, see the SSL expiry monitoring article.
Fourth, open the host's status page. Most hosts publish a single-page summary of outage activity. If the host is having a regional or storage failure, that is the page that says so. Cloudflare publishes an independent status page for the CDN itself; if your host runs behind Cloudflare, the CDN status is the layer to check on top of the host status.
Fifth, look at the public DNS for one of your critical edge hosts. If you run Cloudflare, the dig output of example.comshould return an IP and not a SERVFAIL. If other resolvers can resolve it and yours cannot, the problem is on the resolver path — your ISP, your VPN, or your local DNS.
Sixth, look at the registrar. If your domain recently rolled over hands or the WHOIS contact email expired, a registrar-side hold can return DNS as a no-answer without the registrar telling you so. ICANN publishes context on registrar-level outages for outages of that shape. For the broader Google Search Central guidance on what crawlers see during an outage, see the Search Central documentation.
What the ladder does not fix
It diagnoses. It does not restore. When the ladder tells you the host is the layer that failed, the restore path belongs to the host's on-call. When the ladder tells you the cert chain is the failed layer, the restore path belongs to whoever manages the cert renewal. The ladder's job is to put you in front of the right human before ten minutes pass.
If you would rather skip the ladder entirely on the next outage, run a one-time free URL audit so you know the four URLs to put under watch plus a comparison with UptimeRobot if your shop is leaning toward a free-tier alternative.
What the ladder does once, ongoing
Once you have the ladder, the next question is which parts of it you want done for you on a schedule. Probing every minute from outside, with one loud email per outage, is the boring substitute for the second half of the ladder. It does not check DNS or WHOIS for you; the host's status page and the registrar still belong to a human.
SiteGuardian is the watch; the ladder is the manual override. The SiteGuardian pricing page lists three tiers; Starter at $19 a month is the smallest paid path.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions.
How fast can I tell whether my site is really down?
Sixty seconds for the full ladder. The first four checks (private window, external uptime check, TLS check, host status page) settle most cases within thirty seconds. The last two (DNS resolve, registrar) are the long tail and only matter for the smaller number of outages that began at those layers.
Is the external uptime check always right?
The external check sees the same DNS and the same network egress your visitor would. It is the right anchor for "is this a real problem or only mine." The check is still wrong sometimes: a regional CDN blip can hide a real upstream failure from the check, or vice versa. Two external checks from different regions are better than one.
What if the host status page says nothing is wrong?
Read the registrar next. The host may be entirely healthy while the registrar has placed the domain on clientHold because the WHOIS contact email expired. That shape of failure is invisible to a host-only status page.