Broken WordPress site triage

These are the five things that I check if any of my websites go down. Almost every broken website that I fixed has been one of these things.

Having uptime monitoring is a lifesaver because generally speaking, if something goes wrong with one of my clients' websites, I'll know about it and be able to fix it before the client even knows about it. So that's one thing that you should definitely have in place.

The first thing that I check is, is the website actually down or is it just slow? These are two very different problems and require two very different fixes.

If it's just slow, then that normally points towards hosting. So the second thing I check is, has anything changed recently, as in a plugin update?

Has WordPress updated? Has there been a theme update?

And having access to error logs can save you a lot of time here because they'll just give you the answer. No.

3: has anything expired? This could be anything like the SSL certificate or it could even be the domain...

t. An easy one for this is checking if any other sites that you know of on their hosting are working or not.

No. 5: if everything looks clean, then you wanna be checking if you've been hacked.

You wanna see if anybody's been inside your site or not. Most modern hacks don't announce themselves straight away; they sit there dormant for a period of time.

So log in to your host, go to your file manager, and then just check if there are any suspicious modified dates on any files or folders. Also check if there are any files or folders that shouldn't be there that look suspicious.

You can get into the admin and you can see if there are any admin users that you don't recognise. And obviously if you've got any way of checking audit logs to see who's logged in when and what they've done, that can also help.

So most broken sites are one of these five. And generally all of these are preventable.

But the real question is, if one of your sites went down now, would you know what to do, who to call, and how to get it back up and running? Let me know in the comments.