How to Check if a Website Is Down (and Get Alerted Next Time)

Step by step

1. Rule out your own connection

   Open a couple of other well-known sites. If none of them load, the problem is your network, not the site.

2. Check the site from somewhere else

   Use a free "is it down" checker, which requests the page from a server outside your network and reports whether it responded, the HTTP status code, and how long it took.

3. Read the status code

   2xx means the server answered normally. 3xx is a redirect. 4xx (such as 404 or 403) means the server is up but refused or couldn't find that page. 5xx (such as 500, 502, 503) means the server or something in front of it is failing.

4. Check the site's status page

   Many services publish a status page — often at status.<their domain> — that confirms known incidents.

5. Set up monitoring so you don't have to ask again

   Add the URL in Site Monitor and tick "Notify me when the site goes down". You get one email when it goes down and one when it recovers.

You choose which alerts each URL sends — downtime, content changes, slow responses — and we email you when they happen.

What you'll need

• The URL of the site or API
• For ongoing monitoring: a free Site Monitor account
• Optional: the status code or text a healthy response should contain

Down for everyone, or just you?

If a site loads from an outside checker but not from your browser, the problem is local: your DNS, your network, a browser extension, or a block on your connection. Try a different network (for example, your phone on mobile data) to confirm.

If it fails from the outside too, it's down for everyone — or at least for a large part of the internet — and there's nothing to fix on your side.

Up, but broken

A page can return 200 OK and still be broken: an error message rendered inside the normal layout, an empty product list, or a missing checkout button. Simple up/down checks won't catch that.

Site Monitor can also check that the response contains specific text (the "Response body must contain" option) and alert you when page content changes, which catches many of these "up but wrong" failures.

Monitoring your own site or API

For your own services, monitor the URLs that matter most: the homepage, sign-in, checkout, and a health endpoint for your API. Set the expected status code and, for APIs, the HTTP method, headers, and body. The Free plan checks 10 URLs hourly; paid plans check as often as every 5 minutes and add response-time alerts.

Publishing a public status page for those monitors also means your users can check it themselves instead of emailing you.

Common reasons a site goes down

Expired domains and TLS certificates are some of the most avoidable outages: the server is fine, but browsers refuse to connect or the name no longer resolves. DNS changes that haven't propagated, or were made incorrectly, cause similar "down for some people" symptoms.

Deploys are another frequent cause — a bad release, a failed database migration, or a configuration change. Traffic spikes, an upstream provider's outage, and running out of disk space or memory round out the list.

Whatever the cause, the sooner you know, the shorter the outage. That's the case for automated monitoring: a check from outside your infrastructure notices the problem whether or not anyone is looking at the site.

Frequently asked questions

Related

• Free tools: Is it down?
• Features: Uptime monitoring
• Features: Status pages
• Guides: Set up a free status page
• Use cases: Indie devs & SaaS