WordPress Website Goes Down: 6 Steps To Rescue

It’s great having your own WordPress website as a freelancer, isn’t it? You get to showcase your skills and tell clients more about yourself. More importantly, it plays a vital role in your marketing efforts. As such, it’s one of the crucial tools you use to generate revenue.  

But we know, it isn’t always plain sailing. WordPress websites goes down from time to time. And when they do, you could end up losing money. So, it makes sense that you prevent outages as far as possible.

However, despite your best efforts, it could still happen. Now the question is what you should do when it does. Fortunately, we’re here to help. In this post, we’ll look at some of the reasons WordPress websites go down and what you should do when it does. 

Why a WordPress Website Goes Down?

First off, there are many reasons why your WordPress site could go down. This includes everything from your site’s settings to your theme or plugins causing issues. You could even be hacked. Let’s look at some of the things you should consider when your WordPress website goes down.

Is It Really Down?

The first thing you should check is whether your site is really down. Remember, it might seem that your website is down on your end, but it could work perfectly fine for someone else. Now, this could be for a variety of reasons, from your browser to your internet connection. 

The easiest way to do this is by using any of the popular online tools that will show you if your website is down. With these tools, you simply enter your WordPress website’s URL, and they’ll show you its status. 

Maybe It’s Your Hosting?

Once you’ve confirmed your website is, in fact, down, you should check your hosting provider. Occasionally, it happens that hosting providers go offline. This could be for server maintenance, upgrades, repairs, or several other reasons. 

Here, you would need to contact your hosting provider. They will be able to tell you if they’re the culprit. Luckily, many hosting providers show you if the servers are running on their website. 

What About Your Themes and Plugins?

Now that you know that your website is down, and the problem isn’t with your hosting provider, you should check your theme and plugins. It often happens that WordPress updates and causes incompatibility issues with your theme or plugins. It could also be that a theme or plugin compromised your site’s security. 

In this case, the solution could be as simple as updating the theme or plugin. In some cases, you’ll need to reinstall your WordPress website with a theme or compatible plugins. 

Check Your Configuration When WordPress Website Goes Down

Another thing to check when your website is down is your WordPress configurations. Sometimes it could even be something as simple as your site’s settings that’s causing havoc. So, you should check all your settings and configurations. If you use any custom code on your site, it might be worth your while to check that too. 

Do You Have Room for More Traffic?

Once you’ve checked everything mentioned earlier, there’s another thing that could cause your website to go down. In fact, it’s one of the most common reasons why WordPress sites go down. That is, does your site allow more traffic? In other words, you could’ve reached your hosting package limits. 

For example, you could have bandwidth limits on your site. When it reaches these limits, it will not allow any more traffic. It could also go down if you get too much traffic at once, even if you’ve not reached your limits yet. To solve it, you would then need to upgrade your hosting package. 

Prevention Rules When Your WordPress Website Goes Down

Now, there are several things you should do to prevent your site from going down. You should, for example:

• Do proper maintenance on your site regularly. 
• Minimize the number of plugins you use on your site.
• Use high-quality themes and plugins by trusted, reputable developers.  

All these strategies can be effective at solving many of your issues. But we want to focus on making sure your site has enough capacity to deal with any traffic demands. And this is where autoscaling comes in.  

Why Autoscaling?

What exactly is autoscaling? Simply put, autoscaling adapts your website’s resources as the demand fluctuates. This means your website’s resources will scale up when there’s a spike in traffic. Likewise, it will scale down when there’s less traffic. 

To explain the concept better, let’s look at a simple analogy. Imagine you’re driving your car on the highway. When you want to go faster, you’ll press the accelerator pedal. The engine then uses more fuel to create more power and make this possible.

Likewise, if you want to slow down, you’ll step on the brake. The power the engine generates is then reduced, and you use less fuel. 

Autoscaling works in the same way. When there’s a spike in traffic, it will increase the resources needed to keep your website up. When the traffic subsides, it will close all unused resources. In this way, it ensures that your website adapts perfectly to demand which, in turn, improves uptime and availability. 

But there’s also another benefit. Because your website scales based on the demand, you’ll only pay for the resources you use. This eliminates the need to upgrade to a higher hosting package, and pay more, to cater for those times when there’s more traffic.

Ultimately, this makes autoscaling one of the easiest, fastest, and most affordable ways to ensure your WordPress website doesn’t go down. 

The Bottom Line

As a freelancer, your WordPress website is one of the most important tools in your marketing toolbox. One of the best ways to ensure that it’s always available is using autoscaling. When you do, your clients will always have access to your website, and you’ll keep your reputation and professionalism intact. 

And this is where Wonsta comes in. We provide affordable, premium, autoscaling Google Cloud hosting that’s optimized for WordPress. To learn more about our platform and how it can help you, sign up today and get €25 to create your first website.