Knowledge base

Practical guidance for when your website needs attention.

Short technical steps to understand common website problems and choose the right next check.

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.

  1. Check from another connection or an independent system.
  2. Record the HTTP status or connection error and verify HTTPS.
  3. Then inspect hosting, DNS and application logs.
  4. 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.

  1. Request the public URL independently.
  2. Check the final HTTP status after redirects.
  3. Compare repeated checks over time.
  4. 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.

  1. Verify HTTPS without certificate warnings.
  2. Check the expiry date and renew well in advance.
  3. After renewal, verify the certificate actually served publicly.
  4. 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.

  1. Record the time, URL and request context.
  2. Inspect application and web server logs for that time.
  3. Find the first relevant exception instead of only the final 500 response.
  4. 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.

  1. Identify the failing page or action.
  2. Inspect PHP and WordPress logs without exposing debug details publicly.
  3. Relate failures to recent updates or changes.
  4. 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.

  1. Define exactly which URL and status count as available.
  2. Use a consistent measurement interval.
  3. Store incident and recovery times.
  4. Add HTTP, SSL and application context when needed.

99.9% says nothing about functionality outside the measured check.

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