A website crash is something no business owner wants to deal with, but it happens more often than you might think, whether due to a technical error or just overuse.
Before panicking, there are some steps you can take right away to ensure your site comes back up quickly and doesn’t suffer any long-term damage. Here are five tips for getting your website back up and running after a crash.
1) Confirm it’s officially down 📉
Before jumping to conclusions it’s important to verify that your website is actually down. Sometimes, pages are cached by your browser and will continue to load even if the website is down.
To check if this is the case, try opening the page in a private browsing window, or a different browser. Once you confirm that this isn’t a cache issue you can move forward with troubleshooting.
2) Pause all content efforts for the moment ✋
It can be tempting to try and immediately start fixing things when your website crashes, but it’s important to take a step back and assess the situation first. Marketing efforts should be paused for the moment while you gather information and create a plan of action.
Items such as blog posts, social posts, and any other media content that may be scheduled during this time should be paused to mitigate any issues that may happen.
3) Find the root cause of the issue 🤔
When your website crashes, one of the first things you want to do is figure out what caused the problem. Sometimes it can be something as simple as a bad plugin or an outdated template. Other times, it may be a more serious issue like a corrupted database.
Once you find the root cause of the issue, you can then start working on fixing it. If you’re unable to address the issue yourself, or if it is outside the scope of your team’s capacity it’s best to contact your website hosting technical support.
4) Contact hosting technical support ⚙
Your website hosting technical support will be able to help you troubleshoot the problem and get your site back up and running. From our experience, the hosting representatives are helpful in their approach and diagnosis and most of the time are able to fix the issue for you.
In the uncommon case that they don’t have the authority to access certain things, they will instruct and the right action to fix the issue.
5) Create Back-ups 🔂
Creating backups of your website and databases will ensure that in the case any corruption has been done you have a safe source for backup.
The most common problems that result in a website going down are usually issues with updates, bad plugins, and corruption within the database files. Backing up your website will create a safety net to ensure you don’t lose everything in the process.
Looking for help with Technical Support for your business? Contact our team at V12 Marketing to get your free consultation today!
