Website offline: what should you check first?
An outage can originate in hosting, DNS, TLS, the application or the network. First isolate where the failure occurs.
- Check from another connection or an independent system.
- Record the HTTP status or connection error and verify HTTPS.
- Then inspect hosting, DNS and application logs.
- Record incident and recovery times.
A browser error alone rarely tells you which layer failed.
How do you check whether a website is online?
Seeing a homepage open is not enough. A useful check combines reachability, final HTTP status, redirects and time context.
- Request the public URL independently.
- Check the final HTTP status after redirects.
- Compare repeated checks over time.
- Automate monitoring for business-critical sites.
HTTP 200 does not prove forms, checkout or background tasks work.
Check an SSL certificate and prevent expiry
HTTPS can fail when a certificate expires, does not match the domain or cannot be validated through a trusted chain.
- Verify HTTPS without certificate warnings.
- Check the expiry date and renew well in advance.
- After renewal, verify the certificate actually served publicly.
- Monitor expiry automatically for important sites.
A valid certificate is not a full security audit.
HTTP 500 error: what does it mean?
HTTP 500 means the server encountered an unexpected internal error. The browser usually does not reveal the real cause.
- Record the time, URL and request context.
- Inspect application and web server logs for that time.
- Find the first relevant exception instead of only the final 500 response.
- Fix the cause and retest the same route.
Do not expose detailed debug output publicly in production.
Find WordPress errors beyond uptime
A WordPress site can remain reachable while plugins, themes or PHP code fail on specific pages or actions.
- Identify the failing page or action.
- Inspect PHP and WordPress logs without exposing debug details publicly.
- Relate failures to recent updates or changes.
- After the fix, retest both the flow and general reachability.
Uptime and application errors measure different things.
What is uptime and what does 99.9% really mean?
Uptime is the share of a measurement period during which a service met the chosen availability definition.
- Define exactly which URL and status count as available.
- Use a consistent measurement interval.
- Store incident and recovery times.
- Add HTTP, SSL and application context when needed.
99.9% says nothing about functionality outside the measured check.