Website diagnostics: checks and tests when something is wrong

Every page in this section is named after a symptom rather than a cause, because a person whose website is down at four in the afternoon does not search for the cause. They search for what they can see.

Each page follows the same order: what to do in the next ten minutes, then the likely causes ranked by how often they turn out to be the answer, then who can actually fix it and what they will need from you.

Almost every entry in this section ends in the same place — whether you hold the accounts. That is not a coincidence and it is not a sales point. It is the single variable that decides whether a problem takes an hour or a fortnight.

What is in this section: real website issues, symptom by symptom

My website is down — the first four checks, and how to tell a hosting problem from a domain problem from a problem that only exists on your computer.

I have lost access to my own website — no login, no supplier, or a password that used to work.

My domain has expired — what happens in the days after, the recovery window, and what it costs at each stage.

My website has been hacked — the response sequence, in order, and the Australian obligations that may attach if personal information was involved.

My website is not in Google — separating never-indexed from dropped-out, which have entirely different causes.

My website is slow — triage for a site that got slower, rather than a general explanation of speed.

My business email has stopped arriving — usually a domain or DNS event rather than an email one, and it is frequently caused by website work.

My contact form is not sending — the failure that costs the most and announces itself the least.

My security certificate has expired — the browser warning, what it means, and the fifteen-minute fix.

My website looks broken after an update — what changed, how to reverse it, and why a backup you have never restored is not a backup.

My website shows an error page — reading the number, which narrows the cause immediately.

Finding out who controls your website accounts — the audit to do while nothing is wrong.

Read this first, whatever the symptom

Four things are true of nearly every website emergency and knowing them saves the first hour.

Find out whether it is only you. A site that loads for everyone except you is a local problem — a cache, a network, an internet provider — and it is not an emergency. Check on a phone with wi-fi turned off before you call anyone.

Write down when it started and what changed. An update, a payment, a plugin, a staff departure, an email from a registrar. The cause is almost always something that changed in the preceding fortnight, and the sequence is the diagnosis.

Do not delete anything. Not files, not accounts, not the old backup. Recovery is easier from a broken site than from a partially deleted one.

Find out who holds the accounts before you need them. Domain registrar, hosting, platform administrator, email, measurement. If the answer to any of them is “the person who built it”, that is the first phone call and possibly the whole problem.

The four accounts everything depends on

Account	Controls	Symptom when it is the cause
Domain registrar	The name itself and where it points	Whole site and email gone at once
Hosting	The server the files sit on	Site down, email usually unaffected
Platform administrator	The content and the software	Cannot log in, or the site changed
Email or DNS provider	Where mail is delivered	Mail stops, website fine

The second column is the useful one during an incident, because the symptom tells you which account is involved before anyone has looked at anything. The audit that establishes who holds each of them is on the accounts audit, and the wider legal position on ownership is on who owns your website.

Free website checker and test tools to run before you call anyone

Several of the symptoms above can be confirmed with a free checker in under a minute, before you pick up the phone. Most of these checkers work the same way: enter your domain, and the tool sends a test request and reports back. An SSL checker confirms whether a security certificate has actually expired, rather than only warning your own browser has. A DNS checker shows whether a domain’s records have propagated after a change, which is the most common reason “it’s not working for me” and “it’s not working for anyone” turn out to be different reports. Google’s own Search Console will tell you directly whether a page is indexed, rather than guessing from a search result that has not yet updated. None of these tools fix anything — they narrow which of the four accounts above is actually the cause, so the call you make is to the right supplier for the real issues, the first time. Testing more than one site checker against the same symptom is worth doing once, since sites occasionally disagree.

What this section is not: not a site check or a Google report

It is not a repair service and it does not pretend a business owner should be doing technical recovery work. The purpose is narrower and more useful: to let you describe the problem accurately, to the right person, without paying somebody to work out which problem it is.

That distinction matters commercially. A supplier called to “the website is broken” charges for diagnosis. A supplier called with “the domain expired on the eleventh, here is the registrar and here is the account holder” starts at the fix.

Prevention, stated once here rather than on every page

Four items prevent most of what follows: the business holds the accounts, the renewals are on a payment method that will not expire and an inbox somebody reads, the backups have been restored at least once as a test, and somebody is responsible for updates.

Those four are the substance of an ongoing arrangement, and what one should actually contain is on what website maintenance actually is.

What to try next

If something is wrong now, go to the symptom. If nothing is wrong, spend twenty minutes on the accounts audit — it is the only page in this section worth reading before you need it. For what web design covers before anything breaks, start with web design in Australia.