You type in your web address and nothing loads, or you get an error page. Before anyone panics, the first job is to find out whether the site is genuinely down for everybody or whether it is only down for you. Those are completely different problems with completely different fixes.

Try this first

1. Turn wi-fi off on your phone and load the site over mobile data. This is the fastest and most useful test there is. Your phone on mobile data is on a completely different network to your office, so if the site loads there, the site is fine and something local to your office or your computer is the problem.
2. Try a different browser — if you normally use Chrome, try Edge or Safari. This rules out a stale saved copy of the page or a browser add-on getting in the way.
3. Open the site in a private or incognito window. In most browsers that is the three-dot menu, then "New Incognito window" or "New private window". This ignores anything your browser has cached.
4. Ask someone outside the office to try it. A supplier, a family member, anyone not on your network. Two independent results beat one.
5. Check whether your email is still working. Send yourself a message from a personal address and see whether it arrives. This tells you a surprising amount — see below.
6. Write down the exact error. "Not secure", "This site can't be reached", "404", "500", "server not found", or a page from your hosting company all mean different things. The wording is the most useful clue you can give us.

What the email test tells you

Your website and your email usually both depend on your domain name — the yourbusiness.com.au part. But they are typically served by different providers.

So: if email is still flowing normally but the website is down, your domain is almost certainly fine, and the problem is with the web hosting or the site itself. If email has also stopped — nothing arriving, nothing sending — that points at the domain itself, which is a more serious and more urgent situation. Tell us straight away if both have gone at once.

The three usual causes

1. The hosting

The hosting is the computer your website lives on. If it has a problem, the site will not load but your domain is untouched. This shows up as a blank page, an error number like 500, a message from the hosting provider, or a very slow page that eventually gives up. Causes range from the provider having an outage, to the site's software or database falling over, to a plugin update that broke something, to a hosting bill that went unpaid.

2. The domain

The domain is the address itself, which is rented rather than owned. If a domain expires, or its DNS settings are wrong, the whole address stops working — site and email together. DNS is the system that turns your web address into a real location; when it is wrong, browsers say "server not found" because there is nothing to point at. Domain problems are the most disruptive of the three and often the easiest to prevent, since expiry is a date on a calendar.

3. The security certificate

The certificate is what puts the padlock in the address bar. If it expires, the site is technically still there, but browsers put up a full-page warning telling visitors the connection is not private. Most people turn back at that point, so in practice the site is down. This one is distinctive: you get a warning about security or privacy rather than a "cannot be reached" error.

The fix is different for each, and it usually sits with a different provider, which is why identifying which one you are looking at is worth the five minutes.

If that didn't fix it

Log a ticket with as much of this as you can:

• The exact web address you are trying, including whether you typed www or not.
• The exact error message, or a photo of the screen.
• Whether it fails on mobile data as well as in the office.
• Whether email is still working.
• When it last worked, and whether anything changed — a website update, a new plugin, a change of provider, or an invoice that may not have been paid.

If the site is central to how you take business — online orders, bookings, enquiries — say so in the first line and call us as well. A brochure site being down overnight and an order page being down on a Monday morning are not the same emergency.

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.