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Is It Online? How to Check If a Website Is Down Right Now

Published · Vettaly

To check if a website is online, run its full URL through an online checker that tests from outside your network, then load it yourself on a second connection. If the checker fails too, the site is down for everyone. If the checker gets a normal response and you still can't connect, the problem is on your side: your network, DNS, browser or firewall.

That is the real question behind "is it online?": a genuine outage, or just you? Here is a 60-second check you can run right now:

  1. Paste the full URL (including https://) into an online website checker and note the HTTP status code it returns.

  2. Open the site on your phone with Wi-Fi off. Mobile data uses a different network and usually a different DNS resolver.

  3. Try a private or incognito window to rule out a stale cache, cookies or a misbehaving extension.

  4. Compare the results. It fails everywhere: the site is down. It works anywhere except your computer: the problem is local.

If it is your own site that won't load, jump to What to do if your own website is down below.

Down for Everyone or Just You? How to Tell

The pattern of failures tells you whose problem it is. Match what you see against this table:

What you see

Most likely cause

Whose problem

Checker fails from several locations

Server down, host outage, expired domain, broken DNS

The site's

Checker gets a 5xx error

Server or application failing

The site's

Fails only in some countries

CDN edge problem, regional DNS, geo-blocking

The site's (partial outage)

Checker gets 200, you get nothing

Local network, DNS cache, firewall, VPN

Yours

Works on mobile data, fails on Wi-Fi

Router, ISP or the network's DNS resolver

Yours (your network)

Works in incognito, fails in a normal window

Cache, cookies or an extension

Yours (your browser)

Three quick cross-checks settle most cases:

  • Switch networks. Turn off Wi-Fi on your phone and use mobile data.

  • Switch browsers. Try another browser or a private window.

  • Switch DNS. Point your device at a public resolver such as 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google). If the site loads, your ISP's DNS was the problem.

HTTP status code cheat sheet

A checker that only says "up" or "down" hides the most useful detail: the status code.

Code

What it means

Is the site down?

200 OK

Page served normally

No

301 / 302

Permanent / temporary redirect

No, follow it to the final URL

403 Forbidden

Server refuses the request (permissions, firewall, geo-block)

Up, but blocking you

404 Not Found

The page doesn't exist

Site up, page missing

500 Internal Server Error

The application crashed or is misconfigured

Yes, for that page

502 Bad Gateway

A proxy or CDN got an invalid response from the origin server

Yes, the origin is failing

503 Service Unavailable

Server overloaded or in maintenance

Yes, usually temporary

504 Gateway Timeout

A proxy or CDN waited too long for the origin

Yes, the origin is slow or unreachable

In short: 2xx means success, 3xx means redirect, 4xx means the request or page is the problem, and 5xx means the server is.

Step-by-Step: Check If a Website Is Online

Step 1: Run the full URL through an online checker

Enter the exact address, including https:// and www if the site uses it. example.com and https://www.example.com/ can behave differently, because each extra hop is a redirect that can break on its own.

If you want more than a yes or no, paste the URL into Vettaly's free single-page audit. There is no sign-up: it fetches the page from our servers, records every redirect hop and the final status code, and scores the page's technical SEO in the same report.

Step 2: Read the status code and response time, not just "up"

An "up" verdict can hide real problems. A homepage that takes eight seconds to respond is technically online but losing visitors. A chain of three redirects before the final 200 works today and is one bad rule away from a loop. Look at the code, the number of hops and the response time together.

Step 3: Verify from the command line

If you're comfortable with a terminal, these commands give you a second opinion in seconds (replace example.com with the site you're testing):

# Is the host reachable at all? (Some servers block ping, so a timeout alone doesn't prove the site is down.)
ping -c 4 example.com

# Fetch only the response headers. The first line shows the status code.
curl -I https://example.com

# Follow redirects and print the final status code and total time (macOS / Linux)
curl -sL -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{time_total}s\n" https://example.com

# Does the domain resolve to an IP address?
nslookup example.com

On Windows, drop -c 4 from ping, and in PowerShell type curl.exe instead of curl (there, curl is an alias for a different command). nslookup works as shown.

Step 4: Compare results from several locations

Outages are often partial. One CDN edge can fail while others serve the page, and DNS changes can take up to 72 hours to reach every resolver. A checker that tests from multiple regions shows whether the problem is global or limited to one area. If only one region fails, the site's CDN or DNS is the likely culprit.

Why Is a Website Not Loading? Common Causes

Most outages come down to five things: the server, DNS, the certificate, a bad change, or an attack. Here they are, grouped by whose problem they are.

On the site's side:

  • Server overload or crash. A traffic spike, a memory leak or a failed database takes the application down, usually with a 500, 502 or 503.

  • Hosting provider outage. The whole data center or platform is having a bad day, and every site on it goes with it.

  • DNS failure or expired domain. Wrong DNS records, a misconfigured name server, or a domain nobody renewed. Browsers report that the server "can't be found".

  • Expired SSL/TLS certificate. The server is fine, but browsers block the page with a full-screen security warning, so for most visitors it might as well be down. Our guide on how to check if a website is safe explains what that warning means.

  • A bad deploy, plugin conflict or config change. The most common cause on sites that change often. If the outage started right after a release, start there.

  • DDoS attack or overzealous protection. An attack can overwhelm the server, and a CDN or web application firewall (WAF) rule can block real visitors by mistake, often with a 403.

On the visitor's side:

  • A router, ISP or Wi-Fi problem

  • A stale DNS cache on your device or network

  • Corrupted browser cache, cookies or an extension

  • A VPN, proxy or ad blocker interfering with the connection

  • A workplace firewall or country-level block

What to Do If a Website Is Down for You

If checkers can reach the site and you can't, work through these in order:

  1. Clear the site's cache and cookies, or open it in a private window.

  2. Restart your router, or switch to mobile data to confirm it's your network.

  3. Flush your DNS cache:

    • Windows: ipconfig /flushdns

    • macOS: sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

  4. Disable your VPN, proxy or ad blocker and reload.

  5. Switch to a public DNS resolver such as 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.

If none of that works, the block is likely upstream: contact your ISP or, at work, your IT team.

What to Do If Your Own Website Is Down

When it's your site, speed matters more than elegance. Work from scope to cause:

  1. Confirm the scope. Is it the whole site or certain pages? Every region or one? Test the homepage and a deep page from a multi-location checker.

  2. Check your host's status page and open a support ticket if the outage is on their side.

  3. Read the server error logs and look at the last change. If the outage began right after a deploy, plugin update or config edit, roll it back first and investigate second.

  4. Check the boring things: domain expiry, DNS records and the certificate's expiry date.

# Where does the domain point right now?
dig +short example.com

# When does the SSL certificate expire?
echo | openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -servername example.com 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -enddate

# When does the domain registration expire? (Output format varies by registry.)
whois example.com | grep -i expir

A typical incident looks like this. A plugin update goes out at 14:00 and the homepage starts returning 500. Nobody notices until a customer emails at 15:20. From there it's fast: a checker confirms 500 from every region (2 minutes), the error log points to the updated plugin (10 minutes), and rolling it back restores 200 (5 minutes). Total fix: about 17 minutes. Total outage: 1 hour 37 minutes. Most of the downtime was spent not knowing, which is what monitoring fixes.

Does Website Downtime Hurt SEO?

A short outage rarely hurts rankings; a long or repeated one can. When Googlebot hits 5xx errors, it temporarily slows crawling and keeps already-indexed URLs, but URLs that keep returning server errors are eventually dropped. Once the server returns 200 again, crawling ramps back up gradually. DNS failures and timeouts are treated like server errors, and indexed URLs that stay unreachable can be removed within days.

In practice:

The wrong status code can do more damage than the outage itself. A broken deploy that returns 404 on real pages tells Google they're gone, and indexed URLs returning 4xx are removed. A maintenance page that returns 200 can be treated as a soft 404 or, worse, indexed in place of your content.

Use 503 with Retry-After for planned maintenance

For planned downtime, return 503 Service Unavailable with a Retry-After header. The 503 says the outage is temporary; the header tells crawlers when to come back, in seconds or as a date:

HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Retry-After: 3600

Keep the window short: hours, not days.

Why crawlability carries so much weight

A page that can't be fetched can't be indexed, however good its title or content. That's why Indexation is the heaviest category in Vettaly's scoring, at 30% of the total, and why our indexation rules check canonical tags, noindex directives and canonical chains. Downtime makes those problems worse: a canonical that points at a URL now returning errors sends search engines to a dead end. Our crawler is also built to crawl politely, so an audit never adds load to a server that's just recovered.

After the outage: confirm recovery and get recrawled

  1. Confirm the site returns 200 from outside your network, on the homepage and a few deep pages.

  2. In Google Search Console, run URL Inspection on your most important pages and request indexing.

  3. Resubmit your XML sitemap.

  4. Watch the Page indexing and Crawl stats reports for server errors over the next few days.

  5. Crawl the whole site to catch stragglers: pages still erroring, redirects that now loop, and internal links pointing at dead URLs.

How to Monitor Your Site So You Hear About Downtime First

Manual checks have one flaw: you only run them after someone complains, so you're always the last to know. In the incident above, 80 of the 97 minutes passed before anyone looked.

An uptime monitor checks your site on a schedule and alerts you the moment it fails. When you set one up, cover these:

Setting

Recommendation

Check frequency

Every 1–5 minutes for revenue-critical sites; 5–15 minutes for most others

Locations

At least 3 regions, alerting only when 2 or more agree, to avoid false alarms

What to check

Homepage plus key pages (checkout, login, sign-up): the status code and a word that should appear on the page

Alert channels

Two independent channels, such as email plus SMS or chat

Also watch

SSL certificate and domain expiry, 14–30 days ahead

Where Vettaly fits

To be clear, Vettaly is not an uptime monitor. It doesn't check your site every minute or send downtime alerts, so pair it with a dedicated monitor for that. Vettaly answers the question that comes next: which pages are actually broken, and how does that affect crawling and indexing?

  • Single-page audit, no sign-up. Paste a URL to see every redirect hop, the final status code and a scored report, with each deducted point traced to a public rule ID. Guests get one page a day, and the report is kept for 24 hours.

  • Full-site crawl. A free account crawls up to 30 pages per audit, 3 audits a month; Pro runs up to 2,000 pages per crawl. Rules such as links.internal.broken and site.redirect.loop flag broken internal links and redirect loops, so you can tell a failing page from a redirect or canonical problem.

  • Polite by design. The crawler honours robots.txt and Crawl-delay, keeps to five concurrent requests per domain at most, and spaces requests 200–500 ms apart. That matters when your server has only just come back.

Run a crawl after every incident and every major deploy. It turns "the site is up" into "every page is up, and nothing links to a dead URL".

FAQ

How do I know if a website is down for everyone or just me?

Test the URL with an online checker that connects from outside your network, then load it on a different connection such as mobile data. If both fail, it's down for everyone. If the checker succeeds and you can't connect, the problem is your network, DNS or browser.

Is it online, or is my internet down?

Open a few other well-known sites. If they load, your internet works and the problem is that one site or the route to it. If nothing loads, restart your router or contact your ISP.

What does a 503 or 502 error mean?

A 503 Service Unavailable means the server is running but can't handle the request right now, usually because of overload or maintenance. A 502 Bad Gateway means a proxy or CDN in front of the site got an invalid response from the origin server. Both are server-side problems that visitors can't fix.

Why does a site load on my phone but not on my computer?

On mobile data, your phone uses a different network and DNS resolver, so the difference points to your computer's network, DNS cache or browser. Flush your DNS, clear the browser cache, and turn off any VPN or ad blocker.

How long does website downtime usually last?

Most outages last from a few minutes to a few hours: a restart or rollback is quick, while host-wide incidents take longer. DNS changes can take up to 72 hours to reach every resolver, so DNS-related problems can linger for some visitors.

Does website downtime affect Google rankings?

Short outages rarely do. Google slows crawling when it sees server errors and keeps indexed pages for a while, but URLs that keep failing for several days can drop out of the index. For planned maintenance, return 503 with a Retry-After header.

How can I check if a website is up from the command line?

Run curl -I https://example.com and read the status code on the first line: 200 means the page is being served. ping example.com tests whether the host responds, though some servers block ping, and nslookup example.com confirms the domain resolves.

What's the difference between a DNS error and a server error?

A DNS error means the domain name can't be translated into an IP address, so your browser never reaches the server and says the site can't be found. A server error (5xx) means your browser reached the server, but the server failed to return the page.

Audit one page first