Is Your Website Down or Showing a Critical Error? What to Do
You open your website and there’s no website. A blank screen, a “There has been a critical error on this website” message, or something about the database you don’t understand. And today of all days someone was going to ask you for a quote through the contact form.
In short: there is almost always a specific cause, and it can almost always be fixed without rebuilding anything. First, check whether the website is down for everyone, write down the exact message and the last thing you changed, and stop poking around blindly. In WordPress, the critical error usually comes with an email to the administrator that lets you enter a recovery mode.
First: is it down for everyone?
Before assuming the worst, rule out the simple things:
- Open it from another device and another connection, for example from your phone on mobile data, off the office wifi. If it works there, the problem may be your network or your browser cache.
- Check whether the whole website fails or just one page. The home page going down is not the same as one particular page or the admin area.
- Check your email. A notice from your hosting provider (suspension, resource limits, maintenance) or your registrar (expired domain) explains many sudden outages.
If it’s down for everyone, it’s time to understand what the website is telling you.
What each error means
This table sums up the most common cases in WordPress and the first thing to do in each one:
| What you see | What it usually means | What to do now |
|---|---|---|
| A blank screen with no message | A PHP error cuts the page off: a plugin or the theme clashes with another one or with the server’s PHP version | Write down what you changed just before and stop installing or deleting things |
| ”There has been a critical error on this website” | WordPress has stopped the website because of a serious fault in a plugin or the theme | Look in the administrator’s inbox for the email with the recovery link |
| ”Error establishing a database connection” | The website can’t reach its database: changed credentials, the database server is down or tables are damaged | Ask your hosting provider whether they have an incident |
| Internal server error (500 error) | The server couldn’t complete the request: broken configuration, not enough memory or a plugin | Save the exact message and ask your hosting provider for the error log |
| The website went down right after an update | The update isn’t compatible with the rest or didn’t finish | Don’t update anything else and find the most recent backup from before the change |
The official WordPress documentation on common errors lists the same usual causes for the critical error: plugin conflicts, theme incompatibilities, an unsupported PHP version, the memory limit or damaged files.
”There has been a critical error”: the email that fixes it
Since WordPress 5.2, when a plugin or the theme causes a fatal error, the website isn’t simply left broken: WordPress shows the error notice to visitors and sends an email to the administrator’s address with a link to enter recovery mode, as explained in the official announcement of the feature.
In that mode, the failing plugin or theme is paused only for you, so you can get into the dashboard and deactivate it while other visitors still see the error. Once you deactivate it, the website works again for everyone. After that, you need to find out why it failed before turning it back on.
The email goes to the WordPress admin address, which isn’t always yours: very often it belongs to whoever built the website. If you don’t get it, check your spam folder too.
If you don’t have the email: what can be checked
If you have access to your hosting (control panel or FTP), there are checks that won’t break anything if done carefully:
- Make a copy of what’s there now, files and database, before touching anything. If something goes wrong, you can return to this point.
- Ask for or download the server’s error log. It usually tells you which file failed and which plugin or theme it belongs to.
- Deactivate plugins without entering the dashboard. The WordPress documentation suggests renaming the
wp-content/pluginsfolder over FTP (for example, toplugins_old). If the website comes back, a plugin is to blame: restore the original name and reactivate them one by one. - Try a default theme. If you suspect the theme, renaming its folder inside
wp-content/themesforces WordPress to use another one. - For a 500 error, the same guide points to the
.htaccessfile as the most likely cause and suggests renaming it and saving the permalinks again.
WordPress also has a debug mode that saves errors to wp-content/debug.log, but its own debugging guide advises against using it on a live website. If you turn it on to find the cause, don’t display errors on screen and switch it off when you’re done.
What not to do
- Deleting plugins blindly. Deactivating can be undone; deleting can’t always. And you can lose settings you won’t get back.
- Reinstalling WordPress “just in case”. It rarely fixes the cause and can overwrite changes.
- Restoring an old backup without saving the current state first. You’d lose everything in between: orders, messages, posts.
- Updating more things to see if it fixes itself. Every new change makes it harder to know what broke it.
When to ask for help
If you don’t have access to your hosting, if it’s a database error and your hosting provider sees nothing wrong, if the website keeps going down or if you see signs of something more (files you don’t recognise, strange redirects, unknown users), this isn’t the time to experiment. There may be a hack behind it: in that case, start with our emergency guide for hacked websites.
How we handle it
When a website goes down, we first look for the cause in the website, the hosting and the error logs, and we make a copy of what’s there before touching anything. Then we get it running again and explain what took it down so it doesn’t happen again.
- Emergency website recovery: from €250 + VAT if the website is back up within the first 30 minutes of work. If the diagnosis is more serious, we give you a quote before going any further.
- We handle emergencies at weekends too.
- With the Smart (€59 + VAT per month) and Business (€100 + VAT per month) maintenance plans, emergency recovery is already included, along with the daily backups that make rolling back quick.
And if your website isn’t built with WordPress, we recover it too: tell us what it’s like and we’ll prepare a tailored quote.
Emergency recovery for websites that are down
From €250 + VAT, weekends included.