Is My Website Down

Down for you, or down for everyone

This check runs from our server, not from your computer, so it answers the question your own browser cannot. If the site responds here and not for you, the problem is on your side: your internet connection, your DNS, a cached page, or a firewall at your office. If it fails here as well, the problem is the site or its hosting, and that is worth raising with whoever runs it.

Both the plain and the secure address are tested, because the difference between them is often the whole fault. A site where https works and http does nothing will appear broken to anyone who types the address without typing the prefix first, which is almost everybody.

Reading the status code

Anything in the 200 range is a normal page. The 300 range is a redirect, which is fine in itself as long as it ends somewhere. A 403 or 401 means the server deliberately refused, which is correct for an administration area and wrong for a home page. A 404 means the server is running perfectly and the page you asked for does not exist, so the hosting is not the problem. The 500 range is the only group that points directly at broken code or a failed database, and that is the one to send to a developer rather than a hosting provider.

Response time in context

The figure measured here is how long the server took to produce the page, not how long a visitor waits. A real page load also downloads images, scripts and fonts, so a visitor experience is always slower than this number. Under 300 milliseconds is a healthy server. Over two seconds means something is wrong at the server itself, usually a database query, an overloaded shared host or a plugin doing far more work than it should on every single request.