When a website stops working, first establish what is failing. A site that will not load, a quote form that loses messages and a shop that cannot take payment need different responses. The owner’s first job is to keep customers informed and give the technical team a clear account of the failure, not to guess at a plugin or restore an old copy immediately.
Keep this plan outside the website, with the host, domain and maintainer contacts. If a customer can still reach you by phone or an established business profile, use that route while the fault is investigated. Do not claim that every enquiry will be recovered after an outage.
In the first ten minutes: confirm the scope
Check one affected page from a normal browser on a phone and desktop. Note the exact URL, time, visible error and whether the problem happens on both connections. Check another page and the homepage. If only one form or checkout step fails, the site may still be serving pages; treat the customer journey as the incident, even though a monitoring tool says “up”.
Record what changed recently: a WordPress update, DNS edit, new form recipient, payment setting or hosting notice. Do not infer causation from timing alone. A basic fact log is enough to help support start at the right layer.
| Observation | What to record |
|---|---|
| Start time and affected URLs | Exact time and page addresses |
| Customer experience | Error message or failed step |
| Business experience | What arrived, or did not arrive |
| Checks | Devices and connections used |
| Recent changes | Approved updates and notices |
| Escalation | Provider status or ticket number |
Do not put customer personal data in a public support post or screenshot. Use the provider’s secure support channel where details are genuinely needed.
Keep a working contact route visible
If the homepage is reachable but the form is not, a temporary notice may direct visitors to an established phone number or mailbox. Agree the message and owner before changing live copy. If the whole site is unavailable, confirm that the business’s existing Google Business Profile, social account or other channel still gives accurate contact details. Avoid changing DNS in haste merely to show a message; an unplanned nameserver change can also interrupt email.
For a service business, arrange who monitors the fallback route and who records enquiries received during the incident. When the site returns, check that the route still works and reconcile any missed messages. Our form-delivery guide is for the narrower case where the form appears to submit but no enquiry reaches the business.
Escalate to the right service owner
Use the account map from the website ownership audit. A domain expiry or DNS fault goes to the registrar or DNS administrator; a host outage goes to the hosting provider; a broken page or plugin conflict goes to the WordPress maintainer; a mail-delivery fault may need the email administrator. Several layers may be involved, so keep one incident owner coordinating the reports.
Ask the technical owner to preserve the current state before a repair where that is relevant. An old backup can be valuable, but restoring it over a live shop may overwrite newer orders or content. Our restore-test guide explains what a backup must contain and how to assess it safely. For a fault that followed an update, the staging and release guide helps compare the intended and actual states.
If there are signs of unauthorised access, altered content or exposed data, treat that as a potential security incident rather than an ordinary outage. Seek qualified help, preserve evidence and follow current reporting and legal advice applicable to the situation. The NCSC’s small-business response and recovery guidance sets out preparation, identification, resolution, communication and learning; a generic website checklist is no substitute for incident specialists.
Return to service with a task test
“The homepage loads” is only one result. Have the business owner check the customer tasks affected: service page, phone link, labelled form submission, receiving inbox and, where applicable, a test order and its notifications. Record the time service was accepted and any remaining exception. Then write down the cause once established, the repair made and the prevention task. Do not give customers an invented outage cause while investigation is ongoing.
If the disruption exposed a recurring responsibility gap, compare your WordPress maintenance-plan scope and hosting support before buying anything new. A host with backups and staging can help with part of the response; it does not take ownership of every business-specific form, plugin or order path. The website continuity plan gives the full owner record to prepare before the next failure.
