Before assuming your WordPress site is broken, it’s worth ruling out the simpler explanation: the problem might not be WordPress at all.

Three different things people mean by “WordPress is down”

1. Your specific site is down — other sites work fine, just not yours.
2. Your hosting provider is down — every site on that server or host is affected, not just yours.
3. WordPress.com (the hosted service) is having issues — this is different from self-hosted WordPress.org sites entirely, and only affects sites built on wordpress.com.

How to tell which one you’re dealing with

Use a third-party tool built exactly for this — sites like “Down for Everyone or Just Me” or “Is It Down Right Now” check your URL from outside servers and tell you immediately whether the problem is global or local to you.

You can also check manually: load your site from a different network entirely (mobile data instead of wifi), or ask someone in a different location to check. If the site loads for others but not for you, the problem is local on your end — not the site itself.

Rule out your own connection first

Before troubleshooting WordPress, eliminate the simplest possibilities:

• Clear your browser cache and reload — your own computer can hold onto an old, broken version of a page that has actually already been fixed.
• Try an incognito or private window, or a different browser entirely — browser extensions and corrupted cookies can create the illusion that a site is down when it isn’t.
• Flush your local DNS cache — on Windows, running ipconfig /flushdns in Command Prompt; on Mac, running sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder in Terminal. This clears outdated location data your own computer is holding for the domain.

If these checks point to your own device or browser rather than WordPress itself, DigitalPedia’s guide to everyday tech fixes covers the most common device-side culprits in more depth.

Check your hosting provider’s status page

Most major hosting companies publish a live status page listing any ongoing incidents. If your host shows an active outage there, no amount of WordPress troubleshooting will fix it — you’re simply waiting on them to resolve it on their end.

If it really is your site: what to check first

Once you’ve ruled out your own connection and your host’s infrastructure, the remaining causes are specific to your site:

• A plugin or theme conflict, especially right after a recent update.
• An expired domain or DNS misconfiguration — surprisingly common, and easy to miss if a renewal or a DNS record change happened recently.
• A database connection error, which has its own specific causes and fixes.
• A security breach redirecting or disabling the site.

Looking at exactly when the problem started, and what changed right before it, is usually the fastest route to the actual cause — whether that turns out to be a blank white screen, a database issue, or something else entirely.