WordPress Site Down Checklist for Hosting Support

A calm checklist for the classic WordPress panic moment.

When a WordPress site goes down, the temptation is to immediately blame the last plugin update, the host, the theme, the database, Mercury being in retrograde, or all of the above.

A better approach is to work through a simple checklist.

1. Check the HTTP response

curl -I https://example.com

A 200, 301, 403, 404, 500 or timeout all point you in different directions.

2. Check DNS

If the domain is not resolving, WordPress is not the problem yet.

dig example.com
dig www.example.com
dig MX example.com

You can also use DNSNow to check DNS records without needing a terminal.

3. Check logs

Look for PHP fatal errors, plugin errors, permission issues and resource problems.

tail -100 error_log
grep -i "fatal error" error_log
grep -i "memory exhausted" error_log

If you want to get better at this from the command line, see searching Linux logs for errors.

4. Check plugins and themes

If you have WP-CLI available, it can speed up safe checks.

wp plugin list
wp theme list
wp option get siteurl
wp option get home

For learning material, IT Books can be a useful place to collect WordPress, Linux and server admin reading resources.

5. Do not skip the simple stuff

Disk full, expired SSL, wrong DNS, blocked IPs and PHP version mismatches can all look like WordPress problems from the outside.