What To Do When Your WordPress Site Goes Down (Step-by-Step)

Don't Panic. Diagnose. Your WordPress site just went down. Maybe it's a white screen. Maybe it's a 500 Internal Server Error. Maybe it just loads forever. Take a breath. WordPress sites go down all the time, and 90% of crashes have the same handful of causes. Here's how to systematically figure out what went wrong and fix it. Step 1: Confirm It's Actually Down Before debugging, rule out the obvious: Check from another device/network — it might be your ISP or DNS cache Try incognito mode — rules out browser cache issues Check your hosting status page — the server itself might be down Try curl -I https://yoursite.com — see the actual HTTP response code If you get a 200 response but the site looks broken, it's a theme/frontend issue. If you get 500, 502, or 503, keep reading. Step 2: Check the Error Log If you have SSH access: tail -50 /var/log/apache2/error.log # or tail -50 /var/log/nginx/error.log # or WordPress-specific: tail -50 /var/www/yoursite/wp-content/debug.log If you don't hav